International workshop on ‘What Drives Inequality’

Why does inequality differ so much across countries?

While income inequality trends have been extensively researched, much less is known about the driving forces behind international differences in inequality. Yet, differences across countries remain more striking than the increases in inequality recently observed within any industrialized country.

LISER, the University of Luxembourg and the University of Antwerp convene an international workshop to bring new light to the underlying drivers of inequality and to unpack the reasons for wide variations in inequality across countries.

We seek to attract papers discussing the role of labour markets, taxation, social protection and redistributive policies, but we are especially interested in papers studying the role of deeper drivers such as political institutions, norms and attitudes and preferences for redistribution. Advancements to methodology and critiques on the cross-country comparability of inequality measures are also welcome.

While the main discussion may be about income inequality, we hope to attract contributions about wealth, consumption or other forms of inequalities.

Vienna Macroeconomics Workshop

Gabriel Lee (Regensburg and IHS)

David Andolfatto (FRB St. Louis and SFU)

Martin Gervais (Iowa)

Technology and heterogeneous capital: explaining the decline of the labour share

Seminar Topic:

We investigate the decline of the labour share in a world characterized by rapid technological changes and increasing heterogeneity of capital assets. Our theoretical model allows for these assets to affect the labour share in different directions depending on the capital-labour substitution/complementary relationship and the workers’ skill level. We test the predictions of our model using a large cross-country, cross-industry data set, considering different forms of tangible and intangible capital inputs. Our results show that, over the 1970-2007 period, the decline of the labour share has been mainly driven by technical change and ICT assets, mitigated by increasing investments in R&D-based knowledge assets. Using new information on intangible capital we find that, in more recent years (from 1995 onwards) innovative properties increase the labour share while economic competencies contribute to its decline, particularly for the low and intermediate skilled workers. Our results are robust to an array of econometric issues, namely heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, and endogeneity.

Gender Inequalities in Extending Working Lives

Considerable efforts have been made by policymakers to encourage individuals to extend their working lives, both in the UK and across Europe. While remaining in work for longer can bring benefits for individuals as well as for society more broadly, there is increasing recognition that impacts may differ for different groups.

The Fairer Active Ageing for Europe (FACTAGE) project is exploring the emerging inequalities associated with longer working lives. This one-day workshop will focus particularly on issues relating to gender inequalities associated with the extension of working lives, including emerging findings from the FACTAGE project, along with presentations from invited speakers.

Inequality and Social Relations

LISER together with many partners in Luxembourg co-organizes the following lecture.

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.

Speaker
Prof. Jean-Paul Chavas (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

IHS Internal Seminar: Beate Littig

Green jobs, sustainable work or the ecology of labour – rising discursive stars?

The links between sustainable development and work have been marginalized for decades. This has changed in the last 10 years, since the concept of the “green economy” and “green jobs” has been promoted by various UN-organizations and became parts of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). While supra- and international as well as national politics mainly refer to these concepts other discursive strands have been developed which focus on “sustainable work”, an approach which is particularly discussed in socio-ecological research institutions and NGOs critical to economic growth. This concept demands a broad socio-ecological transformation of the current non-sustainable working societies towards sustainability. Within the (German) trade unionist context the “ecology of labour” has been presented just recently, linking the concept of good labour to ecological issues. The presentation will give an overview of the various strands of the discourse of sustainable development and work and discuss their political perception.

To register please send an email to event(at)ihs.ac.at.