Publications

November 2002 (Revised March 2006)
Case

Inequality and the "American Model"

By: Rafael M. Di Tella and Ingrid Vogel

Official data that suggest economic inequality has been mounting in the United States on various dimensions since 1979. Many causes of such inequality have been postulated: technological change, globalization, demographic factors, and changes in public policy (notably... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Wealth and Poverty; Corporate Governance; Social Issues; Government Administration; United States

Educators

February 2007 (Revised September 2007)
Case

Chile: The Conundrum of Inequality

By: Bruce R. Scott and Jessica Leight

Following the violent overthrow of the Allende regime, Chile embarked on economic reforms that emphasized free markets. These reforms were followed by rising inequality as well as growth. In 2005, business leaders speak out on the necessity of reducing the... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Economic Systems; Equality and Inequality; Government and Politics; Markets; Chile

Educators

21 Sep 2015
News

Income Inequality and U.S. Competitiveness

20 Aug 2012
News

How Americans view wealth and inequality

December 2014 (Revised November 2015)
Case

Governing the 'Chinese Dream': Corruption, Inequality and the Rule of Law

By: Rafael Di Tella, Meg Rithmire and Kait Szydlowski

Xi Jinping assumed his position as head of China's fifth generation of leaders in 2012. Xi was head of both the People's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party, which had ruled China since 1949. Xi inherited a country far more unequal than the one that Mao... View Details

Keywords: China; Growth; Inequality; Wealth And Poverty; Social Stability; Perceptions Of Inequality; Chinese Dream; Chinese Political Thought; Corruption; Equality and Inequality; China

Educators

Contributing to the burgeoning discourse on economic inequality, we expose an inequality in what the poor are socially permitted to buy. Across 11 experiments (n = 4,179), we demonstrate that lower-income individuals are held to more... View Details

2021
Chapter

Geographic Inequality and the Internet

By: Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein

BOOK ABSTRACT: This cutting-edge Handbook offers fresh perspectives on the key topics related to the unequal use of digital technologies. Considering the ways in which technologies are employed, variations in conditions under which people use digital media and... View Details

2018
Working Paper

Corporate Tax Cuts Increase Income Inequality

By: Suresh Nallareddy, Ethan Rouen and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

This paper studies the effects of corporate tax changes on income inequality. Using state corporate tax rate changes as a setting, we show that cutting state corporate tax rates leads to increases in income inequality. This result is robust to using regression and... View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Taxation; Income; Equality and Inequality; United States

SSRN

27 Oct 2011
News

HBS Professor Studies Wealth Inequality

April 27, 2022
Article

Inequality in Researchers' Minds: Four Guiding Questions for Studying Subjective Perceptions of Economic Inequality

By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Shai Davidai, Daniela Goya-Tocchetto, Barnabas Szaszi, Martin Day, Stephanie Tepper, L. Taylor Phillips, M. Usman Mirza, Nailya Ordabayeva and Oliver P. Hauser

Subjective perceptions of inequality can substantially influence policy attitudes, public health metrics, and societal well-being, but the lack of consensus in the scientific community on how to best operationalize and measure these perceptions may impede progress on... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Perception; Analysis

Article

Exposure to Harmful Workplace Practices Could Account for Inequality in Life Spans Across Different Demographic Groups

By: Joel Goh, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Stefanos A. Zenios

The existence of important socioeconomic disparities in health and mortality is a well-established fact. Many pathways have been adduced to explain inequality in life spans. In this article we examine one factor that has been somewhat neglected: people with different... View Details

Keywords: Occupational Health; Inequality; Life Expectancy; Socioeconomic Issues; Health

21 Jun 2024
News

Is African Inequality Inevitable?

January–February 2018
Article

Inclusive Growth: Profitable Strategies for Tackling Poverty and Inequality

By: Robert S. Kaplan, George Serafeim and Eduardo Tugendhat

More than a billion people in the developing world remain in extreme poverty and outside the formal economy. Traditional CSR programs have done little to alleviate the situation and rarely produce transformative change.
Instead of trying to fix local problems,... View Details

Keywords: Inclusive Growth; Sustainability; Social Impact; Business Strategy; Shared Value; Impact Investing; Inequality; Corporate Governance; Balanced Scorecard; Strategy Execution; Economic Growth; Developing Countries and Economies; Poverty; Equality and Inequality; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Strategy; Investment

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August 2004
Article

Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans and Americans Different?

By: Rafael Di Tella, Alberto Alesina and Robert MacCulloch

We study the effect of the level of inequality in society on individual well-being using a total of 123,668 answers to a survey question about “happiness”. We find that individuals have a lower tendency to report themselves happy when inequality is high, even after... View Details

Keywords: Equality and Inequality; Happiness; Global Range; Local Range; United States; Europe

Forthcoming
Article

Social Security and Trends in Wealth Inequality

By: Sylvain Catherine, Max Miller and Natasha Sarin

Recent influential work finds large increases in inequality in the U.S. based on measures of wealth concentration that notably exclude the value of social insurance programs. This paper shows that top wealth shares have not changed much over the last three decades when... View Details

Keywords: Wealth; Equality and Inequality; Taxation; Insurance; Welfare