Oh no, not again, more theory about what economists do! Don’t worry; today it’s about Charlie Chaplin and broken glass too. The other day I read a letter to the editor in the FT titled, “Economics in just one sentence” (in the February 25, 2014 paper version). It dealt with the question at hand – […]
The Future of Spain Economic Growth: the Elasticity of Employment
Nobody really knows what will happen in terms of Spain’s future growth. Obviously, whatever awaits will depend on many factors, both domestic and foreign. First and foremost, Spanish growth will depend on any and all future reforms and policy measures that the current and future Spanish governments may take. Unfortunately, the reform plans of the […]
How an increase in minimum wage backfires on the poor
Income inequality has increased in practically every industrialized nation in recent decades. The best measure of that change is the Gini index, named after the Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who designed it in 1912. The index values vary between zero, when everyone has exactly the same income, and 1, when one person has all of […]
How large is Latin America’s middle class? 170 or 350 million people?
The subject of Latin America’s middle class has been in the news frequently over the past few years. Together . Therefore Latin America’s middle class is often a hotly debated subject. But how large is Latin America’s middle class? Different studies have yielded a wide range of estimates: anywhere between 170 and 350 million people. […]
Marry Someone Poorer than You, Reduce Income Inequality
Everybody is talking about inequality and everybody seems to have their own favorite culprit, from globalization, to deregulation, to skill-biased technical change, and political capture. Yet a recent paper by Greenwood, Guner, Kocharkov and Cezar Santos (Greenwood, Jeremy, et al. “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality.” National Bureau of Economic Research, No. w19829, […]