The recent revival of the debate around economic inequality is often accompanied by concerns that rising inequality may have political consequences. In this lecture, based on recent literature in political economy and on historical evidence, we will discuss some of these concerns with a focus on two issues a) how political institutions can affect and can be affected by economic inequality, and b) how holding political offices influences individuals’ wealth. We will present historical case studies that show how the accumulation of wealth by some individuals can influence the health of political institutions.

• Full slides presentation

Classically the sense of justice is considered the first line of defense against inequality; but absent a link between inequality and justice, the sense of justice would not awaken to exert its moral suasion. Because both inequality and justice rest on a secure mathematical foundation, it is possible to obtain many theoretical results, including: First, there is no general necessary relation between inequality and justice; their link can be nonexistent or positive or negative. Second, in certain scenarios, as economic inequality increases, the average justice evaluation moves deep into underreward territory, and the justice evaluation distribution stretches outward, increasing the gulf between underrewarded and overrewarded. Third, the just society has a mixed government; distribution of goods is by the many, and distribution of bads by the few.

• Full slides presentation

Child health is increasingly recognized as a critical form of human capital, but only recently have we begun to understand how valuable it is and how its development could be better supported. This lecture provides an overview of recent work that demonstrates the key role of public insurance in supporting longer-term human capital development and points to improvements in child mental health as an especially important mechanism.

• Full slides presentation

Inequalities in health, wherever and however they are measured, are generally large. But, should we be concerned? Philosophers have discussed when health inequalities are unjust – for example, when there are ways they can be ameliorated. But their discourse tends to be qualitative, expressed only in terms of logical argument. Health economists, on the other hand, have proposed a variety of measurements of health inequalities, but generally have nothing to say about the extent to which they are “justified”. In this analysis, we bring together the philosophical and measurement strands of the literature in order to offer a quantitative assessment of which kinds of health inequalities may be justified, including one of the most widespread kinds of ill health, chronic pain.

• Full slides presentation

Bequests and other intergenerational transfers are an important source of the intergenerational transmission of wealth and income inequality. In this presentation, I will try to answer the following three questions: Do people leave bequests and other intergenerational transfers? What is the quantitative importance of intergenerational transfers? Why do people leave intergenerational transfers? For example, are intergenerational transfers motivated by intergenerational altruism toward one’s children? Or are they motivated by a desire to induce one’s children to provide care, attention,  and financial support during old age? Does it matter whether and why people leave intergenerational transfers? In particular, what impact do intergenerational transfers have on the intergenerational transmission of wealth disparities?

• Full slides presentation

The purpose of this lecture is to examine some selected aspects of income distributions across populations. We analyze the concept of inequality and some of its measures developed in the literature. An index of income inequality is a scalar measure of interpersonal income differences within a given population. Social scientists generally use four properties for a good measure of inequality. The measures compatible with these properties allow us to compare inequality, for example, between China and Luxembourg, two countries with very different population size; or, alternatively, between Mozambique and Luxembourg, two countries with very different per-capita GDP. The lecture provides a detailed analysis of these properties and their implications.

• Full slides presentation

This lecture will discuss how interventions at early childhood affect key outcomes among disadvantaged children, including cognition, language and social skills. It will also examine how such interventions change the behaviour of households towards their children, and more generally the way such interventions may be propagated and possibly amplified by changes in parental behaviour.

• Full slides presentation

At a time of high wealth concentration at the top, investors are directing part of their wealth to the art market, that mobilizes annual sales of around 67 billion dollars and rising. Art prices grew more rapidly than stock prices in the run up to the global financial crisis of 2008-09 but its recovery in the period 2009-18 has been weaker than the strong upsurge in stock prices. Is artwork a “safe-haven” asset? Two pieces of evidence are explored in this lecture to address this question: (i) the behavior of real gold prices during the great depression of the 1930s, the stagflation of the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008-09 and (ii) correlation analysis between art prices and stock, oil, gold and bitcoin prices.

• Full slides presentation

This talk will present a framework for understanding how, in the United States, public opinions about inequality, economic opportunity, and redistribution are related to one another in ways that are at odds with key tenets of American exceptionalism, such as American dream and free market ideologies. The framework posits that Americans connect rising and high levels of economic inequality to a restriction of economic opportunities that in turn motivates support for opportunity-enhancing policies (e.g., in education and employment). McCall and collaborators test this model using survey experiments and new survey questions in nationally representative surveys, including, for comparative purposes, in Sweden and Denmark.

• Full slides presentation

There is a long debate on how one should measure inequality or poverty. The first part of the lecture will focus on the pros and cons of using the consumption distribution to measure inequality and poverty, rather than more traditional measures based on income or wages. The second part of the lecture deals with the underlying determinants of consumption inequality, on why economic shocks can lead to spreading of consumption inequality, how households can cope with these shocks, and how their response depends on the development of insurance and credit markets. The questions addressed include: how should we measure consumption? how does consumption respond to income shocks? why do people respond in different ways? can fiscal policy raise consumption demand? Empirical illustrations draw on data for Europe and North America.

• Full slides presentation

People who believe that an unequal outcome is meritocratic are more likely to accept it. However, just as inequality can be conceptualized abstractly as “high” or “low” or more precisely as shares of specific percentiles of the distribution (e.g., the income share of the top tenth of a percent), beliefs about inequality can be abstract or more specific. Some beliefs concern justice in the economy as a whole while others concern the deservingness of specific income classes or racial groups, such as “poor”, “rich”, or “black” people. This talk reviews the literature on different types of beliefs and the different ways in which they can affect redistributive politics.

• Full slides presentation

Educational prosperity is an assessment framework that can be used to assess the capacity of a school district, state, or country to develop children’s literacy skills and well-being, to set goals for increasing their capacity, and to monitor progress towards those goals. The framework follows a life-course approach, with key outcomes for each of several stages of development. These outcomes are referred to as ‘prosperity outcomes’. This lecture will review family, institutional and community factors that drive these outcomes and show that if countries build strong foundations for success for each stage of children’s development, its children will thrive.

• Full slides presentation

Inequality in political empowerment between men and women is higher than in the economic sphere. According to the Global Gender Gap Index (World Economic Forum, 2017), the world has closed only 23% of the gender gap in politics. In Europe, women represent 30% of politicians in legislative bodies and 29.5% in government cabinets (EIGE, 2018). What is the source of this inequality? Why do we care about eliminating it? Are there effective policies to promote female political empowerment and reduce gender gaps in the political arena? This lecture will present recent research addressing the above questions, while offering a picture of gender inequality in politics, and the challenges ahead.

• Full slides presentation

There can be few more readily-accepted statements than “Income inequality is bad for well-being”. We here first consider how well-being is measured, and then ask how it is related to the distribution of income. What may have appeared obvious is in fact not so. When individuals compare their incomes to each other, inequality changes not only absolute income but also income relative to others. In addition, our normative judgements of the “right” level of inequality vary widely according to the method applied to measure them, the part of the income distribution in which income changes, and whether income changes are fair. Reflecting the above concerns, empirical work on income inequality and happiness has produced a remarkable variety of contradictory findings.

• Full slides presentation

International migration is on the rise. In a period of less than 50 years, the stock of migrants has been multiplied by more than 3. This general phenomenon of massive movements of people nevertheless conceals quite an heterogeneous picture in terms of sending and receiving countries. In this lecture, starting from the idea that every move starts with plans, we provide new explanation of that heterogeneity using data from the Gallup World Survey. We argue that these data contain useful information to predict future migration flows. We show that the data can shed some light on the way individuals perceive their own but also the foreign country.

• Full slides presentation

Corruption is closely associated with unfair consequences. Most studies find a positive correlation between corruption and inequality. Not only petty corruption does cause huge losses, it also widens the gap between rich and poor members of the society. However, a few empirical findings explore the possibility of a negative relationship between corruption and inequality, and view it as a pro-poor redistribution mechanism. This lecture will review empirical and experimental findings, and explore how preferences for fairness can be used to influence corrupt behavior.

• Full slides presentation

The last few decades have seen a rise in income inequality. This rise has generated concerns about inequality and its policy implications. Economic inequalities can be evaluated based on fairness. But fairness can be inconsistent with economic efficiency; and it can depend on social relations. This lecture examines the linkages between fairness, economic efficiency and social relations, along with their implications for policy.

• Full slides presentation

Human capital has played a key role in the evolution of inequality over the recent decades. This lecture will first present some facts about inequality in general, then discuss endogenous human capital formation and its role on the labor and marriage markets. I will argue that an ‘inequality spiral’ is generated as educated people tend to marry their own and invest more into their children, increasing assortative matching among their offspring and resulting in more inequality for the next generation.

• Full slides presentation

The PIBien-être aims to go beyond GDP in order to capture the multiple facets of the quality of life. The government of Luxembourg assigned this project to the CES and CSDD to develop a comprehensive notion of well-being. The result is an array of 63 indicators that cover 11 different domains of people’s lives from 2009 onward. The agency in charge of data collection and computation is STATEC. A final report on the project was submitted last year. The talk will focus on some of the shortcomings of the list of indicators and present proposals to move forward.

• Full slides presentation

The connection between the European Identity and inequality presents a puzzle. This talk examines whether the answer to the puzzle is to be found in the facts about income and wealth distribution, or in European attitudes to distributional fairness, or in the connections between European citizens’ preferences for redistribution and their own national ties.

• Full slides presentation

Until recently, surnames for men in most societies were inherited from their fathers. In this talk I show how we can use this fact, and the information content in surnames, to reveal surprising results about the nature and mechanisms of social mobility. In particular surnames reveal that social mobility rates are much lower than conventionally estimated, and hence inequalities greater. Surnames also can offer surprising insights into the sources of regional inequalities in economic outcomes. They suggest, for example, that regional disparities in modern England are entirely the product of selective migration of economic talent within England over the past 200 years.

• Full slides presentation

Inequality in economic outcomes partly reflects genetic variation: there is considerable evidence that economic outcomes are strongly positively correlated within families. However, the strength of these correlations varies across both time and space, suggesting that other forces are also at play. This leads to more complex models of family assocations in economic outcomes. The policy implications of different views of the relationship between economic inequality and genes are discussed. While doubt can be cast on the view that inequality is mostly genetic, the implications for, e.g., policies to reduce inequality are widely misunderstood.

• Full slides presentation

This lecture analyzes inequality in one of the wealthiest countries worldwide. Traditionally, Luxembourg has been a relatively equal society but new economic developments are changing this. What does the new digital economy mean in this respect? Is there polarization in the labour market? Is growing inequality a result of prices in the housing market?What active public policies could be employed to reduce inequalities?

• Full slides presentation

There is consistent evidence that technology, particularly automation, is affecting the skill content of jobs and driving inequality in labor markets of developed economies. How does the skill content of jobs change as countries develop? Is automation also generating polarization in labor markets of developing countries? Recent analysis using labor force surveys, as reported in the World Development Report 2016, suggests that similar processes of labor market polarization are emerging in some developing countries. The trends depend on whether the evolution of shares or absolute levels of employment in middle-wage, middle-skill jobs are examined. This lecture will discuss this evidence, its possible drivers, what could be expected in the future as new technologies continue to evolve and become cheaper, and draw implications for skills building and other social policies.

• Full slides presentation

What makes for a good life? While the richness of human experience cannot be captured in numbers alone, it is important that the statistics shaping public policy reflect both people’s material living conditions, and the quality of their lives. One of the strengths of the Better Life Initiative is in providing a diverse range of internationally comparable statistics on well-being – from health and wealth, to jobs and housing, safety and civic engagement.  Yet national averages disguise a great deal of variation in people’s experiences within OECD countries – and it is important to understand how life is going for people, not just on average, but across all groups in society. Indeed, inequality is an important feature shaping the well-being of societies, including disparities associated with age, gender, education and income. The 2017 edition of the OECD report How’s Life? highlights the many facets of inequality, showing that gaps in people’s achievements and opportunities extend right across the different dimensions of well-being.

• Full slides presentation

Recent research in economic history has unearthed previously unknown facts about the long-term trends in inequality. We now have, for at least some areas of Europe, time series of key inequality indicators from ca. 1300. These new data are changing the way in which we perceive economic inequality not only in the past, but even today – as a key lesson from history, is that economic inequality (especially, but not only, of wealth) has a marked tendency for increasing over time, and only catastrophes on the scale of the Black Death or the World Wars managed to bring it down, albeit temporarily. This lecture will provide an overview of these recent acquisitions, and will debate why they are relevant for current debates.

• Full slides presentation

International economic institutions such as the OECD and the IMF are increasingly paying attention to the problem of high and rising inequalities and its causes and consequences. It is however not so obvious whether the policy solutions these institutions are recommending are adequate and comprehensive. In the analysis carried out in this lecture, particular attention will be paid to the role of labour markets institutions such as collective bargaining and other mechanisms of wage formation. In addition, recent developments that focus on the role and the causes of falling labour shares are discussed.

• Full slides presentation

Does the existence of inequality change how we should think about macroeconomic policies? Are recessions more severe in more unequal countries? Traditionally, macroeconomics had no role for inequality. But better data and more powerful computing methods mean that we are now able to study the rich interactions between inequality and the macroeconomy that characterize our world. On the one hand, inequality shapes macroeconomic aggregates; on the other hand, macroeconomic shocks and policies also affect inequality. Incorporating the enormous heterogeneity observed at the micro level, and in particular the large disparities in income and wealth, often delivers strikingly different implications for monetary and fiscal policies and allows us to study their distributional implications.

• Full slides presentation

Why do conservative governments, from the UK to Japan, accept and even promote the creation of or the increase in the minimum wage? Why is a large share of the workforce considered as low-productivity while their competencies are improving and their work is intensifying?Why are profits still growing in the wake of economic liberalization? This lecture proposes a personal global answer to such puzzling questions. Various determinants of rent-sharing in modern capitalism are disentangled. I stress two mechanisms: the triumph of proprietarism and the misleading naturalization of labor earning and productivity inequality.

• Full slides presentation

Are all forms of inequality equally bad?  Modern views of social justice suggest that one should distinguish between income differences that result from the exercise of personal responsibility or effort, and those that arise from differences in circumstances beyond the control of individuals, such as race, gender, family background or country of birth. These views have shaped a vibrant literature on the definition and measurement of inequality of opportunity. This lecture will review both the theory and the empirics of measuring inequality of opportunity, and explore implications  for intergenerational mobility, poverty, and our very notion of development policy objectives.

• Full slides presentation

Equity issues are central to policy debates about climate change. But what is the role of inequality between and within nations on carbon emissions? The first part of the talk reviews recent findings on this issue. The second part of the talk examines barriers to first-best climate policy. Economics has offered clear and convincing first-best solutions to the problem of climate change, but they do not play a central role in the setting of climate policy. Drawing on insights from the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, the talk argues that, for political economy reasons, there is little chance of enacting the economists’ first-best solution. The talk then discusses what this means for global and European climate policy, including the Paris Agreement.

• Full slides presentation

Children face very different chances of getting ahead in life depending on the circumstances of their birth. Parenting and its role in the diverging destinies of rich and poor children are discussed in this lecture. Inequality begins at home. It develops from the differences in the ways advantaged and disadvantaged parents interact with their children. Traditional policy interventions fail to attack the root cause of achievement gaps. To equalize the playing field, governments may need to invest in parents so parents can better invest in their children. Unfortunately, large-scale interventions typically yield modest effect sizes at best and often do not even change children’s skills in the long term. Understanding what motivates parents to invest in their children could have a major impact on the design of policies to reduce inequality in children’s skill development.

• Full slides presentation

In economics, inequality is most often defined by how unequal the resources that people can live on are. In contrast, inequity refers to the fact that people are not being offered the same possibilities of generating those resources, even though they might all expend the same efforts. The former type of inequality is often called ‘inequality of outcomes’ whereas the latter corresponds to ‘inequality of opportunity’. This lecture will focus on the crucial distinction between these two concepts of inequality, showing that measuring them calls for different methods. In addition, correcting them may not conform to the same social objectives or have the same impact on the functioning of the economy. The two approaches may not rely on the same policy instruments. At the same time, however, the two concepts are complementary in several respects.

• Full slides presentation

(PPPs). Yet new information on PPPs tends to spark furious debate, as relative income rankings get shuffled and international income differences are compressed or widened. This lecture will discuss some of the measurement challenges that can lead to these surprises, and how best to deal with the ensuing uncertainty. The consequences of these measurement challenges will be discussed in the context of current debates about global inequality and poverty, and in a historical perspective regarding the long-run shape of cross-country income inequality.

• Full slides presentation

In this talk, I will survey recent evidence on how fairness concerns motivate distributive behavior, in particular the moral idea of personal responsibility. I will also present recent results of a comparison of the fairness preferences in the United States and Scandinavia. There is a striking difference in income inequality and redistributive policies between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there is a corresponding cross-country difference in social preferences, we conducted the first large-scale international social preference experiment, with nationally representative samples from the United States and Norway. We show that Americans and Norwegians differ significantly in fairness views, but not in the importance assigned to efficiency. The study also provides robust causal evidence of fairness considerations being much more fundamental for inequality acceptance than efficiency considerations in both countries.

• Full slides presentation

We should care about inequality because it has the potential to shape opportunities for the next generation. This presentation offers a framework for thinking about this relationship, and for understanding why the adult outcomes of children are more closely tied to their family background—with the poor raising the next generation of poor adults, and the rich more likely to see their children to be rich in adulthood—in countries with greater inequality. Differences in families, labour markets, and public policy all play a role in understanding why the United States has relatively less social mobility than many other countries.

• Full slides presentation

Inequality in society often leaves parts of the population undeserved and with no good access to social services. The gap only grows over time, as governments don’t have enough money to resolve these social issues, and philanthropy is limited and not always sustainable. New resources are needed to be able to fund the best and most effective social interventions in order to deal with the most pressing problems of our societies. Impact investment in general, and social impact bonds specifically create the mechanisms that are able to bring new investors’ money into social issues. This lecture will introduce new concepts in funding social issues and moving from treatment to prevention.

• Full slides presentation

Households differ in the goods and services they buy and in the composition of their investment portfolios. These two differences result in inequality in both their inflation experiences as well as in their exposure to inflation risks. How large are differences in inflation experiences across different types of households and in the extent to which households are exposed to inflation risk? The answer to this question matters for many policy decisions. For example, it affects the choice of appropriate indexation of benefits and salaries, the quantification of changes in the inequality in standards of living, as well as the assessment of the effects of monetary and fiscal policy measures. This talk reviews the literature that has aimed to answer this question for the USA and provides new evidence for EU countries.

• Full slides presentation

Have inheritances become more important over time in the U.S.? There is reason to think that the share of wealth transfers has been rising as the current generation of elderly is now the richest in U.S. history.Moreover, the baby-boom generation has now reached the prime inheritance age group of 50-59 and may be the first generation to inherit a considerable amount of money. However, there is little evidence of an inheritance “boom”.

How much, if at all, do inheritances contribute to overall wealth inequality? Though inheritances received are much larger for richer than poorer families, inheritances, as a share of current wealth, tend to be higherfor poorer families and thus tend to reduce overall wealth inequality.

This lecture will explore these and other issues based on the U.S. Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances.

• Full slides presentation

• Full slides presentation

Child poverty is now a high priority in the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Poverty reduction will have to be monitored using international and national monetary poverty measures and also in ‘multi-dimensional’ terms. This lecture outlines the current state of play in global child poverty profiles and considers options for improving child poverty measurement. Empirical evidence will consider international and national profiles of child poverty and discussion will consider issues that are common to both poverty and inequality measurement for future SDG monitoring. 

• Full slides presentation

Over the recent decades there has been a dramatic rise in top income shares in most Western countries. Several explanations have been proposed, some pointing at the role of market-driven forces such as technology and globalization whereas others emphasize the importance of political and economic institutions of taxation or changing social norms about income differences in society. This lecture presents the latest academic research about the evolution of top income and wealth positions around the Western world, what we know about the central determinants and how economic policy contribute to shaping these outcomes.

• Full slides presentation

All over the world, education has undeniably become the main force of inclusion in society. Yet, much progress remains to be made, especially at the tertiary education level. In spite of the extensive efforts to improve access worldwide, tertiary education—especially the university sector—generally remains elitist, with the majority of enrolled students coming from wealthier segments of society. Against this background, this lecture proposes to summarize available evidence on the main forms and the scope of disparities in tertiary education, present the principal determinants of inequality at the tertiary education level, and outline promising approaches and measures for offering more equal opportunities to all disadvantaged groups.

• Full slides presentation

Equality of opportunity is a popular goal that a broad spectrum of political opinion is united on. Equality of outcomes as an objective of public policy is more divisive. I would argue that social concern over gender inequality in occupational outcomes is driven mainly by the very close association between occupational inequality and income inequality. If women were under-represented in low paying occupations lacking promotional opportunities, it is doubtful that gender occupational inequality would be a significant social issue (at least not for women). This lecture will explore the association between job titles and wages, job mobility in the workplace, and how to sort out how much of the gender wage gap can be attributed to job segregation in the workplace. Evidence will come from studies of actual firms as well as laboratory experiments.

• Full slides presentation

What type of inequality should we take a look at when analyzing world inequality and how did inequality vary over time? Does globalization refer to the international convergence of prices or real wages, to the increase in the volume of trade, the decline in transportation costs and trade restrictions or to the rise in information flows (social globalization)? What was the impact on inequality of technological change and institutional factors, such as the decline in the union coverage, in centralized collective bargaining and labor market regulations? Empirical evidence will be presented on these various issues, in particular on the impact of globalization on inequality.

• Full slides presentation

This lecture discusses the implications of developments in the labour market in terms of non-standard work on individual earnings and household income inequality. It documents how non-standard work affects the distribution of jobs and wages and discusses whether non-standard jobs are stepping-stones or not. The presentation also shows that non-standard workers living alone or with other non-standard workers suffer from higher chances of low income and poverty. In addition, it examines work incentive and adequacy effects of tax and benefit rules.

• Full slides presentation

How much inequality is too much? A philosophical answer is provided in Rawls’ dictum that only as much inequality can be tolerated as improves the lot of the least well-off. Using health and well-being to concretize Rawls’ criterion, this presentation offers evidence suggesting that reducing inequality would result in meaningful improvements to population health and well-being. Data are presented on the relationships between inequality and health in several domains, and causal mechanisms operating at various levels are discussed. This evidence collectively suggests that levels of economic inequality have reached levels that are ethically indefensible in many countries.

• Full slides presentation

This lecture considers what we know about the methods by which the intergeneration transmission of advantage and disadvantage work their way through the lifecycle; it shows how inequality affects mobility; it offers a perspective on when and how public policy can intervene to alter the time path of child development from birth through adulthood. The steps in the life course are illustrated with cross-national examples of parent–child gradients in multiple child outcome domains.

• Full slides presentation

A great deal of work over the last ten years has been carried out to measure the progress of our societies going “Beyond GDP”. New indicators have been developed, as well as initiatives to better integrate economic, social and environmental policies. In the meantime, income inequality has grown in both developed and developing countries. The lecture will discuss possible frameworks to measure equitable and sustainable well-being and opportunities to develop policies to reduce inequality in European countries.

• Full slides presentation

Shifting economic policies and changes in the pension and economic landscape have forced individuals around the world to assume greater responsibility for their own financial well-being. But how prepared are individuals to take on this greater responsibility and to process the economic information needed to make informed decisions about their current and future finances? Evidence using data collected across many countries shows that the level of financial literacy is very low, even in countries with well-developed financial markets. Financial illiteracy is not only widespread but is particularly acute among some demographic groups, such as young people and women. Moreover, financial literacy can be linked to borrowing and saving behavior. It is also an important determinant of wealth inequality; according to the predictions of an intertemporal model of saving, from 30 to 40% of wealth inequality can be accounted for by financial literacy.

• Full slides presentation

• Full slides presentation

The bulk of economic research on the issue of diversity has been centered on the role of economic and wealth inequality in the global economy. However, one cannot deny the impact of linguistic diversity on economic and political development, as well as on public policies. In spite of the claim that “globalization proceeds in English”, linguistic diversity is a global social phenomenon. On one hand, there are financial costs, communication barriers, divisions in national unity, and, in some extreme cases, conflicts and war, associated with linguistic diversity, on the other hand, there is a growing support for protection of group and an individual identity. In our lecture we will argue that denial or restriction of linguistic rights of various population groups, or so-called linguistic disenfranchisement, could be detrimental for economic growth, political and social development.

• Full slides presentation

Inequality in education concerns not only school attendance, but also what you may achieve in terms of competences. It represents a potential cause of inequality in earnings, since it drives people in or out of the labour market. Policies favouring school inclusion seem effective in reducing educational inequality. These policies may take the form of either increases in years of education or increases in abilities. Years of education partially compensate for a possible lack of cultural resources due to family background, while abilities favour labour market participation and earnings potential. This lecture will address these issues from a theoretical and empirical perspective.

• Full slides presentation

The income distribution is most commonly assessed in terms of how much inequality or poverty there is in a given year or by how much inequality and poverty have changed over time. This lecture makes a case for also drawing on information about income mobility – the links between people’s incomes in one year and the next and between parental and offspring income. The questions addressed include:

• Why does mobility matter?
• How much mobility and poverty persistence is there?
• To what extent is there a trade-off between greater income inequality and poverty and greater mobility?

Empirical illustrations draw on data for Europe and North America.

• Full slides presentation

Inequality among men and women is still a reality. What is the role of the European Union in establishing work-family reconciliation policies in Europe? How do these policy provisions vary across high-income countries? What do we know about the effects – both intended and unintended – of reconciliation policies? What explains the comparatively low level of provision in the English-speaking countries, especially in the United States?

• Full slides presentation

Over the second half of the 20th century, conflicts within national boundaries became increasingly dominant. One-third of all countries experienced civil conflict. There are two remarkable facts about social conflict that deserve notice: first, within-country conflicts account for an enormous share of deaths and hardship in the world today, and second, internal conflicts often appear to be ethnic in nature. Which factors influence social conflict? Do ethnic divisions predict conflict within countries? How do we conceptualize those divisions? If it is indeed true that ethnic cleavages and conflicts are related, how do we interpret such a result? Is ethnicity instrumental to achieve political power or economic gain?

• Full slides presentation