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Income and wealth inequality has steadily risen in the U.S. over the last two decades. At the same time, private capital markets have expanded, while public stock market listings have fallen. To what extent could both these trends be related to the increasing participation of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) in private capital markets?

The urban population in developing countries grew by 12.5 percent between 2015 and 2020, and it is projected to grow by 64.7 percent by 2050 (UNCTAD, 2021). Part of this growth is driven by rural-urban migration, which is expected to intensify due to climate change. Whether urban developing economies will be able to generate enough good jobs to accommodate this fast-growing workforce is a fundamental question for economic development. The consensus among economists since Harris and Todaro (1970) and Fields (1975) is that rural-urban migrants end up unemployed or informally employed. The empirical evidence that confirms this view is mostly based on short-term (year-on-year) effects of rural-urban migration. This begs the question of what happens over longer time horizons?

This paper brings these forces together in one framework to understand how firm market power and worker bargaining power shape wages and welfare, and whether high-wage firms pay more because they are more productive, because they earn larger rents, or because workers capture a larger share of those rents.

This paper investigates how unrepresentative product testing can systematically erode trust within excluded populations. The authors investigate this hypothesis---that who is in the data matters for diffusion---in the context of medical innovation, where Black Americans make up 13% of the population, yet are less than 5% of clinical trial participants

To understand to what extent South Africa’s post-Apartheid transformations have met the expectations of the early 1990s, this study looks at the evolution of overall and racial inequalities, before and after tax and transfers, from 1993 to 2019.

During the 1980s and 1990s, merger waves led to unprecedented corporate consolidation, and prior studies have highlighted that both markups and firm concentration have considerably risen over that timeframe. Although mergers allow firms to unlock synergies, which are productivity-enhancing, they also allow firms to capture market share, thereby reducing competitive pressure in the affected industries. I study the effects of merger activity on aggregate outcomes, and whether mergers can explain the trends mentioned above.

Despite significant progress in recent decades, the labour market gap between men and women remains substantial in almost all countries across different dimensions: employment, wages, promotions, and earnings (Olivetti and Petrongolo 2016). Recent research has shown that the differential impact of parenthood on men and women – so-called child penalties – accounts for much of the remaining gender gap (Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard 2019; Kleven et al. 2019). Prior evidence on child penalties has been limited to a small group of high-income countries. In Kleven, Landais, and Leite-Mariante (2024), we estimate child penalties for 134 countries around the world, representing more than 95% of the global population.

Public sector pay growth in the United Kingdom has lagged behind the private sector over the past 15 years, raising concerns about recruitment and retention. Yet evidence on who enters public sector jobs across generations has remained limited, largely due to data constraints. In this research, we draw on new administrative data to document how the probability of entering public sector work has evolved, both across education groups and across different areas of the public sector.‍

Why is there such strong opposition to carbon taxes in rural areas? In this article, we focus on the role of perceived unequal treatment. We argue that per- ceptions of unequal treatment by the state lead people living in rural areas to be less supportive of carbon taxes, because they believe that carbon taxes un- fairly punish those that have already been disadvantaged by the state. We carry out a survey with a representative sample of around 3,000 respondents from the United Kingdom to test our argument. We provide observational and experimen- tal evidence showing that for those living in rural areas, increased perceptions of unequal treatment by the state reduce the perceived fairness of carbon taxes and substantially lower support for carbon taxation. Our results suggest that tackling deep-rooted perceptions of unequal treatment in rural areas is crucial for building broad public support for carbon taxation.

Brazil is one of the world's most unequal countries, yet little is known about how much of this extreme inequality persists across generations. This paper provides the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility (IGM) for a large developing country using tax data. A central challenge is that nearly a third of Brazil's economy is informal — unrecorded in administrative registries. We develop a method to measure both formal and informal income, enabling the study of mobility for a representative sample of 1.3 million children born between 1988 and 1990 and their parents.