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This paper provides a detailed empirical assessment of the evolution of income inequality and the redistributive e↵ects of the tax and transfer system following the 2007-2008 crisis. It focuses on the US case, drawing on data from the Current Population Survey for the period 2007-2012. Contrary to most existing studies, it uses of a wide range of inequality indicators and looks in detail at several sections of the income distribution, allowing for a clearer picture of the heterogeneous consequences of the crisis. Furthermore, it analyses the contribution of di↵erent types of taxes and transfers, beyond the overall cushioning e↵ect of the system, which allows for a more refined assessment of its e↵ectiveness. Results show that although the crisis implied income losses across the whole income distribution, the burden was disproportionately born by low to middle income groups. Income losses experienced by richer households were relatively modest and transitory, while those experienced by poorer households were not only strong but also highly persistent. The redistributive system had a crucial role in taming the increase in income inequality in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, and during the GR years, particularly cash transfers. After 2010, however, its e↵ect became weaker and income inequality experienced a new surge. The findings of this paper contribute to a better understanding of the distributional consequences of aggregate crises and the role of tax and transfer policies in stabilising the income distribution in a crisis aftermath.e theoretical bases for the impact of higher education policy on social mobility.

ABSTRACT Nell'ambito delle ricerche di storia economica, l'area lucchese appare relativamente trascurata dalla più recente storiografia italiana ed in particolare toscana. A parte indagini a carattere principalmente politico o demografico, il ricco patrimonio documentario conservato negli archivi lucchesi è stato fino ad oggi solo parzialmente sfruttato. Questa ricerca intende apportare nuovi dati e riflessioni inedite al dibattito che vede lo studio della disuguaglianza nella distribuzione della ricchezza come questione chiave nell’analisi dello sviluppo economico nel lungo periodo. Attraverso i dati rintracciabili negli estimi trecenteschi e cinquecenteschi e nel Catasto guinigiano dei primi anni del Quattrocento, fonti fiscali che si sono già dimostrate ottimi strumenti per misurare i livelli di ricchezza della popolazione censita e ricostruirne i trend macroeconomici di concentrazione, si cercherà di fornire un primo quadro d’insieme della distribuzione della proprietà nel contado della città della seta. Particolare attenzione sarà prestata anche al possibile impatto della Peste Nera che, stando alla storiografia più recente, pare aver determinato una lunga fase di declino nella disuguaglianza conclusasi solo attorno alla seconda metà del XV secolo. The area of Lucca seems relatively neglected by the most recent Italian economic historiography. Apart from research primarily devoted to political or demographic issues, some of which date back several decades, the rich documentary patrimony preserved in the archives of Lucca was until now only partially exploited. This paper aims to provide new data and reflections to the debate which sees the study of the inequality in the distribution of wealth as a key issue in the analysis of economic development in the long run. By using the data recorded by some fiscal registers (the estimi of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries and the catasto guinigiano of the early fifteenth century), a kind of source which already proved to be an excellent tool to measure the levels of wealth of the surveyed population and to reconstruct its macroeconomic trends of concentration, we will try to provide a first overview of the distribution of property in the countryside of the city of silk. A particular attention will be paid also to the possible impact of the Black Death which, according to the most recent literature, seems to have led to a long period of decline in inequality ended only around the second half of the fifteenth century.

Using a specific data set drawn from the Spanish Module Education to Labour Market Transitions (2000), this paper analyses the labour market entrance of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life. Moreover, special attention is paid to graduates, because Spain experienced a strong growth in the demand for higher education during the last decades of 20th century. The empirical evidence shows that, besides other personal and family individual's characteristics, human capital exerts a strong influence on the finding of an employment. With regard to the match between education and work, the results indicate that over-education is a common phenomenon in the Spanish youth labour market. However, unlike what one could expect, being a graduate seems to be associated to a lower likelihood of over-education in the first employment.

A fundamental switch in the fertilitydevelopment relationship has occurred so that among highly developed countries, further socioeconomic development may reverse the declining fertility trend. Here we shed light on the mechanisms underlying this reversal by analyzing the links between development and age and cohort patterns of fertility, as well as the role of gender equality. Using data from 1975 to 2008 for over 100 countries, we show that the reversal exists both in a period and a cohort perspective and is mainly driven by increasing older reproductive-age fertility. We also show that the positive impact of development on fertility in high-development countries is conditional on gender equality: countries ranking high in development as measured by health, income, and education but low in gender equality continue to experience declining fertility. Our findings suggest that gender equality is crucial for countries wishing to reap the fertility dividend of high development.

ABSTRACT In this paper we allude to a novel role played by the non-linear income tax system in the presence of adverse selection in the labor market due to asymmetric information between workers and firms. We show that an appropriate choice of the tax schedule enables the government to affect the wage distribution by controlling the transmission of information in the labor market. This represents an additional channel through which the government can foster the pursuit of its redistributive goals.

Discrimination in access to public services can act as a major obstacle towards addressing racial inequality. We examine whether racial discrimination exists in access to a wide spectrum of public services in the US. We carry out an email correspondence study in which we pose simple queries to more than 19,000 local public service providers. We find that emails are less likely to receive a response if signed by a black-sounding name compared to a white-sounding name. Given a response rate of 72% for white senders, emails from putatively black senders are almost 4 percentage points less likely to receive an answer. We also find that responses to queries coming from black names are less likely to have a cordial tone. Further tests suggest that the differential in the likelihood of answering is due to animus towards blacks rather than inferring socioeconomic status from race.

Using the British Household Panel Survey this paper explores the extent to which marital and cohabiting unions differ with respect to the short term effects of union dissolution on psychological distress. We test the hypothesis that spouses experience larger negative effects but the results show that this difference is not statistically significant once the presence of children is controlled for. Having children is found to be a major source of psychological distress when one is going through union dissolution. However, it does not explain high psychological distress which seems to be associated with intrinsic factors (the personality trait neuroticism) rather than with contextual factors.

Are public good games really capturing individuals’ willingness to contribute to real-life public goods? To answer this question, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with communities who own collective goods. In our experiment, subjects voluntarily contribute to a common pool, which can either be subdivided in individual vouchers, as in standard public good games, or used to acquire collective goods, as it happens for real-life public goods. We show that participants’ contributions are larger when the voucher is paid individually, suggesting that individuals’ willingness to contribute to public goods may be overestimated when based on results from laboratory experiments.

The north-south gap in Italian social capital has been considered by international scholars as an example of how cultural diversity within a country can generate dierent developmental outcomes. Most studies, however, suer from limited external validity and measurement-error problems. This paper exploits a new and representative online lab-experiment to assess social capital patterns in Italy. Our study only partially conrms previous ndings: northerners perform better in trustworthiness, but they are statistically similar to southerners in many other economic preferences such as cooperation, trust, expected trustworthiness, altruism, and risk tolerance. A novelty of this study is that the gap in trustworthiness stems from the lower reciprocity of southerners in response to large transfers from trustors, and it is characterized by the intergenerational transmission of norms. Eective convergence policies should target, within social capital, reciprocity, while looking to other, and perhaps more compelling gaps.