The Gini and the tonic: Understanding the dynamics of inequality measurement

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 21 May 2024, 12.30am to 1:30 pm. In-person event. Sir Arthur Lewis Buildling, Room LG.04 (SAL.LG.04)

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Speaker: 
Professor Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Professor of Development Economics and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Globalisation Research, Queen Mary University of London and Visiting Professor, LSE III

Understanding how to accurately measure the dynamics of inequality is of utmost importance to social scientists. In this paper, for the first time, I identify which inequality measures are best suited to capture the dynamics of inequality, especially for panel regression applications. To undertake this study, I generate a dataset of twelve inequality measure types for up to 100 years across 34 countries using annual data on mortality distributions. Upon modelling inequality as a fractionally integrated process I find that inequality measures that are independent of the mean have more stationary cases, a vital requirement for regressors in panel regression analysis. Mean-dependent measures like the Gini, however, are mostly non-stationary, making them wholly unsuitable for panel regressions. This result is confirmed by estimating the "inequality and growth" relationship, where only mean-independent measures generate a stable relationship. Using a VAR approach, impulse responses show that mean-dependent measures are more likely to carry the effect of a shock, making them less suitable for panel regression analyses. Tests of normality and volatility function as excellent "marker" tests whether a chosen inequality measure is suitable for dynamic contexts. The findings suggest that no inequality measure should be used for dynamic purposes without rigorously testing their suitability. 

Welfare regime hybridisation and social inequalities

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 14 May 2024, 12.30am to 1:30 pm. In-person event. Sir Arthur Lewis Buildling, Room LG.04 (SAL.LG.04)

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Speaker: 
Dr Zahid Mumtaz, LSE Fellow, LSE Department of Social Policy

The concept of hybridization in welfare regime literature denotes the presence of multiple forms of welfare regimes in a given context. This means that in any given country, some people might be successfully incorporated into state protection (welfare state regime), while others rely on community and family arrangements (informal security regime), and some are dependent on highly personalized politico-military patrons (insecurity regime).

In this study, we used a novel methodology of data collection to capture welfare regime hybridization in a low-income country like Pakistan. We identified four distinct welfare regimes within the country: Potential welfare state regime (8.2% of the sample), More Effective informal security regime (16.7%), Less Effective informal security regime (68.4%), and Insecurity regime (6.7%).

The study sheds light on the diverse spectrum of inequalities present in Pakistan. While a minority enjoys the advantages of a potentially welfare state regime, funded by substantial public resources, a significant portion of the population lacks formal support and must resort to informal means for survival. Regional disparities further compound these inequalities, with certain areas facing greater deprivation than others. Historical factors, including past conflicts and ongoing socio-political instability, exacerbate these disparities, making it even harder for vulnerable communities to access necessary services and support.

Plus ça change? Continuity and change in social attitudes and worldviews in 21st century Brazil

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 May 2024, 12.30am to 1:30 pm. In-person event. Sir Arthur Lewis Buildling, Room LG.04 (SAL.LG.04)

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Speakers:

Dr Fabrício Mendes Fialho, Research Fellow, LSE III; Alberto C. Almeida, Director, Brasilis Institute

In the 21st century, Brazil has undergone rapid changes in societal attitudes towards key issues such as religiosity, race relations, and gender. At the same time, attitudes towards the rule of law and the 'Brazilian knack' have remained steady over recent decades. In this seminar, we will discuss findings from two large-scale national social surveys conducted in 2002 and 2023 to map out the paths of values change in the Brazil over the past two decades.

The Crypto-Utopian Occult Revival and Anti/Fascism

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, Room 2.04 (CKK 2.04). 

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Speaker:

Erica Lagalisse, Visiting Fellow, LSE III

In 2018 Erica Lagalisse wrote Occult Features of Anarchism (2019) as a fellow of the III, and now returns to tell us about how her post-pandemic popular education tour about “conspiracy theory”, which followed its launch and translation, has opened up into ethnographic research connecting contemporary New Age spirituality, the current “psychedelic renaissance” and eugenics in the 21st century.  Lagalisse illustrates how cosmopolitan “digital nomads” share fears of biotechnology manipulated by occult powers, but also similar hopes in psychedelics research, cryptocurrency and technology writ large as sources of social justice. 

Across this counterculture, cryptography and the blockchain are not only seen as powerful tools of social engineering and justice, but also continuous with the perennial “occult” magical tradition.  Funded largely by “cryptocurrency” themselves, “media shamans” entertain occult conspiracy in government, but also a general reverence for the power of the “occult”, a willingness to engage political action in the “occult” oneself, and a shared imagination that digitally perfecting the management of secrecy will somehow inaugurate social equality.

For more info on Lagalisse's podcast series 'Politics after the pandemic', see here: https://lagalisse.net/2024/01/23/podcast-politics-after-the-pandemic-at-the-sociological-review/

Behavioral responses to wealth taxation: evidence from a Norwegian reform

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 19 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, Room 2.04 (CKK 2.04). 

Speaker:

Roberto Iacono, Associate Professor in Economics and Social Policy at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

We analyze behavioral responses to wealth taxation, estimating the causal effects of a unique municipal wealth tax reform in Norway. We exploit variation from the single-period municipal reform reducing the marginal tax rate (MTR) on wealth exclusively in the northern Norwegian municipality of Bø from 0.85% to 0.35%, since 2021. Mimicking the behaviour of a tax haven, Bø represents the first municipality to unilaterally reduce the municipal wealth tax rate since the establishment of wealth taxation in Norway in 1892. We document a significant 66.6% increase in average taxable wealth in response to a 1 percentage point drop in the wealth tax rate. The elasticity of taxable wealth increases to 71.6% when focusing exclusively on wealth taxpayers. We also estimate a significant but more modest 10.3% jump in the weighted mass of wealth taxpayers in the treated municipality. Non-real effects of the reform dominate: mobility of wealthy taxpayers appears as the major behavioral response to the change in the net tax rate, accounting for a staggering 79% of the post-treatment total net wealth in the treated municipality (up from 19% in the pre-reform period). These results emerge in a context with third-party reported wealth data with negligible measurement error, limited evidence of bunching, highly enforced residence-based wealth taxation, and a low degree of out-migration rates.

Inequality of Opportunity and Investment Choices

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 12 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Cheng Kin Ku Building, Room 2.04 (CKK 2.04). 

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Speaker:

Michelle Brock, Associate Director, Senior Research Economist, Office of the Chief Economist at European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)

Inequality of opportunity (IOp) leads to misallocation of human capital and can affect economies via its impact on individual economic decision making. This paper studies the impact of IOp on investment, using a laboratory experiment. We randomized IOp, then subjects chose to invest in a risky asset or savings. Our results suggest that IOp impacts investment choices only for people who are penalized by their circumstances and only once they learn the impact of IOp on their relative position in the income distribution. This disadvantaged group more often invests and invests higher shares of their earnings than the control and advantaged groups. The fact that both IOp and knowledge of relative position need to be present, for the impact on investment to materialize, points to the importance of peer effects, and social preferences more broadly, for understanding the effects of IOp on individual decision making.

Unequal Estate Division for Wealth Perpetuation: Portfolios, Primogeniture, and Patrilineality  

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 5 March 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

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Speaker:

Dr Nhat An Trinh, Research Officer, Institute for New Economic Thinking & Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford

Mounting research documents that wealth strongly persists across generations. Inheritances and inter-vivo gifts from parents to children are key contributors to this persistence. Intergenerational transfers are yet not only made unequally between families. It has been shown that a substantial share of intergenerational transfers is also made unequally within families. In this study, we address this puzzle of unequal division and empirically investigate the distribution of intergenerational transfers through the lens of what we call the ‘principle of dynastic succession’. This principle states that intergenerational transfers are made such that the family and its wealth are carried on into the long-lasting future, leading to unequal division. Analyzing administrative data from the German inheritance and gift tax register (2007-2020), we argue that the principle is particularly salient in the presence of structuring assets (e.g. family business) and that its application varies along the estate distribution. Going beyond individual parent-child transactional relationships, the principle of dynastic succession allows to link intra-familial disparities to long-term persistence in overall wealth inequality more broadly. Thereby, it sheds light on a so far neglected mechanism through which the family generates inequalities both within and between generations

More Unequal or Not as Rich? Dilemmas over Distributional National Accounts for Latin America

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 27 February 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

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Speaker:

Dr Marc Morgan, Research and Teaching Fellow, University of Geneva (UNIGE)

Improving income inequality measures, so that they are more commensurate with official measures of economic growth, is high on the international statistical agenda. But how should income that is reported in commonly-used microeconomic data for inequality studies approximate income that is estimated from macroeconomic data for growth accounting? How new is this global initiative from a historical perspective, and how appropriate is it from a future perspective? This presentation will tackle these questions from the prism of progress we have made to date in Latin American countries following the international agenda. Reconciling micro and macro incomes present us with at least one dilemma: either the region is more unequal or it is not as rich as officially reported. A disaggregation of measures allows us to see what are the different contributions to distribution and redistribution in the region, both methodologically and politically. The continued pursuit of the international agenda needs to account for the wide discrepancies between data sources that we all commonly use, but until now for quite different purposes. 

Then and Now: How Neighbourhood Deprivation in Youth Influences Attitudes towards Inequality

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 13 February 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

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Speaker:

Franco Bonomi Bezzo, Post-Doctoral Researcher, La Statale, University of Milan

The purpose of this study is to reappraise what has been found in qualitative case studies through a quantitative analysis and to investigate the mechanisms linking experiences of collective material deprivation and attitudes towards inequality. These results suggest that while people who have grown up in a phase of expansion of the Welfare state may have felt lower anxiety about inequality, those who have grown up during the full expression of Thatcherism might have developed stronger feelings towards inequality.

Cultural Capital and Access to Opportunity in India

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 6 February 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

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Speaker:

Sam Asher, Associate Professor of Economics & Public Policy, Imperial College Business School

Cultural capital -- specific human capital that allows individuals access to opportunity in stratified societies -- has long been a major field of research in sociology. Economics has been slow to study this concept in part because of the difficulty in measuring cultural capital and in finding suitable empirical settings to study its effects. Leveraging novel data on historical social norms of each one of India's 4,635 ethnic groups (castes, tribes, etc), we generate a new measure of cultural capital by calculating the cultural distance between each of India communities and the economically dominant group in every village, whose control of land gives them significant power over their neighbor's economic, social, and political lives. We use a difference-in-differences strategy that compares members of the same community experiencing differences in cultural capital due to differences in the dominant community across villages. We find that individuals living in communities with culturally distant dominant groups experience large reductions in educational attainment, anthropometric outcomes, consumption and income per capita.

How Do Inheritances Shape Wealth Inequality? Evidence from India

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 January 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

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Speakers:
Kalaiyarasan Arumugam, Assistant Professor, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai
Vikash Vaibhav, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities (JSLH)

Drawing on the three decades of All India Debt and Investment Survey (AIDIS) dataset, the paper maps the drivers of wealth inequality across caste, class and region in India. While studies have examined patterns of inequality in household consumer expenditure, incomes, and wages, wealth inequality particularly of its driving factors has not received much attention, especially during the high economic growth period since the 1990s.   Using decomposition analysis, the paper first examines evolution of different components of wealth contributing to overall wealth inequality in India. It further decomposes aggregate wealth inequality into two main components: price and quantity effects. Since the inherited land and building accounts the large of portion of wealth for average Indian household, distinguishing the land value that results from increased land price or changing quantity acquires significance.

Inequality measurement for bounded variables

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 January 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

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Speaker:
Suman Seth, Leeds University Business School

We propose a novel approach to measure inequality for variables with fixed lower- and upper bounds. Inequality assessment with such variables is different from that with variables lacking fixed upper bounds. The maximum-inequality distributions of non-bounded variables always feature every element, but one, equal to their lower bounds, and many existing inequality measures rank them equally. However, the maximum-inequality distributions of bounded variables contain different proportions of elements being equal to the lower bound. We normatively justify a novel axiom requiring maximum-inequality distributions of bounded variables to be ranked equally, irrespective of their means. Our axiomatically characterised indices measure inequality as the observed proportion of the maximum attainable inequality for a given mean. We also characterise a subset of measures that yield consistent inequality comparisons when switching between attainment and shortfall representations. In our empirical illustration, a starkly different picture emerges when traditional inequality indices give way to our approach.

Do low-quality jobs pay more? Poor-Quality Employment in Europe

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 January 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Parish Building (PAR) Room LG.03. 

Speakers:
Mauricio Apablaza, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile
Gaston Yalonetzky, University of Leeds

In recent decades, much social science attention has focused on the quality of jobs, in particular on those that could be described as poor-quality employment, measured by means of a multidimensional methodology (e.g. Sehnbruch et al. (2020), Florisson (2022), Stephens (2023)). Technical questions about the construction of how multidimensional employment indices can be constructed, however, remain. Similarly, traditional theories of labour economics may question whether deprivation in the labour market is not measured better by simply looking at low-wage employment.

How women win the Latin American presidency

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 5 December 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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Speaker:
Dr Catherine Reyes-Housholder, Assistant Professor, Instituto de Ciencia Política, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

The most difficult kind of political power for women to obtain arguably is the most important: the presidency. How do women win presidential elections? I answer this question by turning to Latin America, a region characterized by powerful presidents and democratic competition. This talk, in turn, develops a two-stage theory of how women win the presidency. I maintain that party nominations (Stage 1) constitute the central black box of women’s victories. Candidates’ traits, which are often gendered, play a crucial role in parties’ decision-making over who to nominate for president. Once the nominations are fixed, presidential elections for women generally function as referendum on parties in power (Stage 2). The key to understanding how women win the presidency therefore lies in understanding how they secure the nomination of major political parties. 

Reconciling equality of opportunity and aversion to income inequality

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 28 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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By using an axiomatic approach, the paper studies different ways to reconcile the principle of equality of opportunity and the aversion to income inequality. Moreover, it characterizes a partial ordering based on the priority of opportunity egalitarianism over income egalitarianism

Speaker:
Professor Vito Peragine, Professor of Economics, University of Bari

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of LSE International Inequalities Institute

Sketching the world elite database

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 21 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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In societies wrought by inequalities, elites matter because of the prominent positions they occupy and the considerable resources at their disposal. These positions and resources imply that their practices, preferences and beliefs have collective implications. That is why no comprehensive understanding of governance and society today can ignore those who occupy positions of extreme prominence and power, and more specifically positions of significant economicpower. Comparable datasets are arguably prerequisite for establishing patterns of regularity, suggesting counterfactuals, and formulating ideas to be tested. The World Elite Database (WED) is a collective endeavour, which aims at directly addressing this challenge. In this presentation, on behalf of the WED participants, Christoph Houman Ellersgaard (CBS) and Paul Lagneau-Ymonet (Paris Dauphine – PSL) will present preliminary results.

Speakers:
Dr Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL 

Dr Christoph Houman Ellersgaard, Associate Professor, Cophenhagen Business School 

Chair:
Dr Michael Vaughan, Research Officer, LSE III

Can Economics help us to understand and address inequalities?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 14 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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This Seminar will present potential shortcomings of Economics as a discipline to discuss and address inequalities (of income, gender and race) in our society. Emphasis will be given on the existence of different ways to do economics, grouped under the heterodox economics umbrella, and how these shortcomings can be overcome with an openness to a plurality of methods and theory.

Speaker:
Dr Carolina Alves, Associate Professor in Economics, UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Chair:
Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, LSE III and Professor of Social Policy, LSE

The role of admission criteria in reducing gender imbalances in higher education

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 November 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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Speaker:
Dr Valentina Contreras, Research Officer, LSE III 

Chair:
Dr H. Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III

This seminar exploits the sudden timing of a reform in the Chilean centralized university admission system to analyze the role of structural factors, such as admission criteria, in the gender imbalances in higher education. The reform introduced a new admission criterion that improved the application scores for students who graduate with a GPA higher than their high school average. In addition, the reform lowered the weight given to high-stakes measures of achievement, such as standardized admission tests. It finds that the reform raised the application scores of women relative to men, and impacted students' career choices.

Do changes in communication systems matter to the politics of inequality?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 24 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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Speaker:
Dr Michael Vaughan, Research Officer, LSE III 

Chair:
Professor Mike Savage, 'Wealth Elites and Tax Justice' Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Martin White Professor of Sociology, LSE

Communication is a key link in the problematic relationship between economic inequality and democratic responsiveness – from shaping individual-level information and attitudes, to structuring public sphere dynamics. How, then, do changes in communication systems (e.g. digitalisation and hybridisation) matter to the politics of inequality? This seminar approaches the question from two perspectives. Firstly, a systematic literature review on the topic of communication about economic inequality will highlight which elements of evolving communication systems are emphasised in current research trends, and which are not. Secondly, a case study of discussion around the “billionaire space race” across legacy and social media will illustrate some of the ways in which changing inequality dynamics and changing media systems intersect.

A far-right frontrunner in the 2023 Argentina’s general election: Who are Javier Milei’s supporters?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 17 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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Speaker:
Valeria Ana Brusco, Adjunct professor, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina

Chair:
Dr Fabricio Mendes Fialho, III Research Fellow

After a decade of political polarization, a marginal candidate, Javier Milei, defies stable coalitions in Argentina. With the rise of post-partisan identities and long-term negative economic results, the ramping uncertainties in Argentina’s political scenario has made the country ripe for the far-right libertarian Milei to use frustration and anxiety to mobilise voters. On the even of the 2023 national election, a crucial question to be answered is: Who are the Milei’s supporters? Our novel survey data shows that Milei’s supporters are not ideologically consistent (regarding issues such as climate change and inequality between men and women, for example) and even though they are homogeneously distributed across regions and socioeconomic levels, they are predominantly young and male.

The evolution of the income floor in Great Britain, 1991-2021: a comparison of cross-sectional and longitudinal estimates

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 10 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

Speaker:
Dr H. Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director of LSE International Inequalities Institute

Relative poverty rates in the UK have been remarkably flat despite significant economic downturns and regressive policy changes over the past two decades. Yet, traditional headcount measures do not necessarily reflect the conditions of the poorest. To overcome this limitation, Ravallion (2016) proposed a measure of the floor – the lower bound of permanent consumption or income – to evaluate progress against poverty. This paper studies the evolution of the income floor in the UK over the past three decades (1991-2021). 

The century of the citizen?

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 3 October 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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Speaker:
Dr Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, Chief Executive of Oxfam GB and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III 

Chair:
Professor Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, LSE III and Professor of Social Policy, LSE

This should be the Century of the Citizen. For most of human history, we’ve been subjects and then consumers, but the end of the Cold War, rising incomes and the arrival of the internet was heralded as the dawn of an emancipatory era. Or so we thought. Instead, poverty and inequality are again on the rise, civic freedoms are under threat almost everywhere, and the digital world seems just as unequal and oppressive – perhaps even more so – than the real world. In this seminar, Dr Sriskandarajah will draw on his experience as a civil society leader and on some research he conducted while a Visiting Fellow at the III to outline how we might reverse these trends and still make this the Century of the Citizen. 

Understanding vulnerabilities of countries for enabling resilient, inclusive and sustainable development

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 September 12.30 to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building (CBG), Room 2.04. 

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Speaker:
Dr Ruth Kattumuri, Founder and Co-Chair of the India Observatory 

Chair:
Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, British Academy Global Professor and Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III

The vulnerability of a country is defined as a risk of exogenous shocks of various origins, such as economic, climatic, or societal disruptions. The shocks could vary in form, origin and intensity, the effect of which is contingent on a country’s specific characteristics and features, including its ability to respond to shocks as reflected in its level of resilience. The Commonwealth Universal Vulnerability Index (UVI), which has informed the forthcoming UN Multidimensional Vulnerability Index (MVI), shows that the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are most vulnerable to exogenous shocks. Further the understanding of the vulnerabilities of countries contributes to an urgent need for a new financial architecture that is not limited to GDP per capita criteria eligibility to provide access to development finance and involves equitable financing mechanisms that are responsive to the specific needs and contexts of vulnerable countries.

Aid and the Transnational Extraction of Care

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Dinah Hannaford, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Houston

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Hiring domestic workers is a routine part of the expat development lifestyle. Though nearly every expat aid worker in the developing world has local people working within the intimate sphere of their homes—as maids, nannies, security guards, gardeners, and chauffeurs—these relationships are seldom, if ever, discussed in analyses of the development paradigm and its praxis. Examining aid workers as employers of domestic labor provides an opportunity to reach a deeper understanding about the function of development both as an industry and as an orienting framework in our contemporary world, as well as a means to consider the role of aid workers as post-colonial subjects in Africa.

Job Insecurity, Savings and Consumption: an Italian experiment

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Conchita D’Ambrosio, Professor of Economics, Université du Luxembourg 

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

Job insecurity has consequences outside of the labour market. Using the 2012 Fornero reform as a natural experiment, a difference-in-differences framework based on a firm-size discontinuity and individual data coming from the Italian Survey on Household Income and Wealth, our results suggest that greater job insecurity reduces consumption and increases savings. We also show that the changes in consumption and savings are a function of the family structure and of the rank in the household income distribution. Last, greater job insecurity reduces all types of consumption except food expenditures and the extra-savings are either invested in safe assets or kept on savings account.

Assessment of Individual Income Growth with Relative Concerns

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Elena Bárcena Martín, Professor of Applied Economics, University of Malaga

Chair:
Professor Facundo Alvaredo, Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III and Co-Director of the World Inequality Database and the World Inequality Lab

We assess individual income growth providing a framework in which each individual accounts for own income growth and for the growth of each individual’s reference group. We take as a starting point the concept of relative deprivation, in which an individual compares with those who are better off, and interpret it as the extent to which an individual is left behind. In this line, we propose that individuals evaluate own income and compare it with income growth of other people in society, which are taken as a sort of benchmark. After some computation, progressive growth and re-ranking are identified at the individual level, and the first component is broken down into one term that captures growth self-concern and another that accounts for growth with respect to others, or relative concerns. The empirical application to Spain over the past ten years shows that this measure supplements the analyses based on common metrics of income distribution and how it helps to identify the different aspects of income growth assessment.

The Dynamics of Lifetime Incomes in France

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 9 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Cecilia García-Peñalosa, Professor of Economics, Aix-Marseille School of Economics

Chair:
Dr H. Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III

This seminar examines the evolution of lifetime earnings in France. We have access to complete earnings histories that allow us to compute lifetime earnings for the cohorts born between 1942 and 1962. The data show that after increasing for several cohorts, median incomes have been flat, although we do not find the decline in median lifetime earnings observed in the US. Lifetime earnings inequality exhibits small changes across cohorts, following a U-shaped pattern but without the marked increase observed in the US. The stability of lifetime inequality seems to be the result of a period of declining dispersion in annual (cross-sectional) earnings and a subsequent decrease in earnings mobility over the lifetime. These results point towards both institutions, such as the minimum wage, and social norms related to female participation as important factors in shaping lifetime earnings dispersion.

Oligarch Sanctions: policies, evasion strategies and side effects

Part of the Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 2 May 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Aston University and Visiting Senior Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of AFSEE programme and Associate Professor, Department of Social Policy

Individual sanction policies have yet to deliver. In the EU and the UK in particular, legal loopholes and gentle sanction designs have given sanctioned oligarchs ample opportunities and time rearrange and evacuate their assets and non-sanctioned, and lesser-known rich to reinvent themselves as longtime Kremlin critics. Compared to the EU and the UK, where a year into the war more than half a dozen of the 20 richest Russians were missing, the US list is less patchy, but it too skipped the name ranked no 1 by Forbes Russia from April 2022. Once it was clear that the war would drag on, Western wealth industries changed tune and declared oligarch boycotts to a core corporate principle. This seminar attempts to take stock of responses to international individual sanction policies since February 2022.

Job loss and earnings inequality: Distributional effects from re-employment in Chile

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Thursday 23 March 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Rafael Carranza, Postdoctoral Research Officer at INET Oxford and the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford and Visiting Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Berkay Ozcan, Associate Professor, LSE Department of Social Policy and Faculty Associate, LSE III

Existing research has shown that job displacement leads to significant and persistent earnings losses in Global North countries, but evidence for Global South countries is scarce. Using administrative data for Chile, this seminar will analyse the effects of formal job loss on workers’ subsequent wages. It provides evidence of the costs of losing formal employment in a country that has become a high-income country in recent years but with a weak labour protection system and high earnings inequality. Second, it examines the effect of job separation on earnings distribution using conditional quantile regressions. 

The Changing Nature of Global Economy: Digital Technology, Labour and Inequality

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 14 March 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Kaushik Basu, C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics, Cornell University

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

The lecture will review the recent global experience and discuss the new challenges not just for economic theory, but for regulation, law and policies to curb inequality. This bend in the road of the global economy is bound to bring about new winners and new losers among nations, in the same way that the Industrial Revolution had done. The lecture will also peer into the future and speculate about who the winners and the losers might be. 

Viable Lives: Life beyond survival in rural North India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 March 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speakers:
Professor Craig Jeffrey, Professor of Human Geography, University of Melbourne
Associate Professor Jane Dyson, Associate Professor of Human Geography, University of Melbourne

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Many minoritized and marginalised populations, including young people, are debating what constitutes a ‘survivable life’ and, in turn, how life can be arranged so that it is more than just survival. In this process they are often analysing how to conceptualise ‘life’. Notwithstanding these trends, however, there is little scholarly work on local discourses and practices of life and viability. This seminar contributes to redressing the balance by examining the spatial and temporal process through which young people imagine and build viable lives in an area of the Indian Himalayas.

Qualitative analysis at scale: An application to aspirations in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Monday 13 February 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. New Academic Building 1.14.

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Speakers:
Dr Vijayendra (Biju) Rao, Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank
Dr Julian Ashwin, Post-doctoral Researcher, London Business School

Chair:
Dr Paolo Brunori, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

This seminar presents a framework with which to extend a small set of hand-coding to a much larger set of documents using natural language processing and thus to analyse qualitative data at scale. The seminar shows how to assess the robustness of this approach and demonstrates that it can allow the identification of meaningful patterns in the data that the original hand-coded sample is too small to identify. The approach is applied to data collected among Rohingya refugees and their Bangladeshi hosts in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, to build on work in anthropology and philosophy that distinguishes between ambition and navigational capacity.

Analysing intergenerational mobility with oriented measures and mobility curves

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 February 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor James Foster, Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, George Washington University 

Chair:
Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, British Academy Global Professor and Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III

This seminar studies oriented measures of intergenerational mobility that differentiate between upward and downward mobility, including headcount ratios that give the incidence of upward (or downward) movements and mobility gaps that gauge the average gain (or loss). We define oriented mobility curves that graphically indicate when mobility comparisons are unambiguous and unanimity partial orderings generated by axiomatically defined classes of oriented measure.

Dynastic measures of intergenerational mobility

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 31 January 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Dr Flaviana Palmisano, Associate Professor of Public Economics, Sapienza University of Rome

Chair:
Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo, Research Officer, LSE III

This seminar suggests a simple and flexible criterion to assess relative intergenerational mobility. It accommodates different types of outcomes, such as (continuous) earnings or (discrete and ordinal) education levels, and captures dynastic improvements of such outcomes at different points of the initial distribution. We suggest an application on Indonesia. Using the IFLS data, we match parents observed in 1993 to their children in 2014, providing one of the rare intergenerational mobility analyses based on a long panel in the context of a developing country.

The role of social norms in shaping collective action

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 24 January 12.00pm to 1.00pm. Online and in-person public event. The Marshall Building - MAR 1.09.

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Speaker:
Professor Roberto González, Professor of Social Psychology, P. Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC)

Chair:
Dr Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of AFSEE programme and Associate Professor, LSE Department of Social Policy

This seminar will address how social norms shape collective action aimed at social change. Based on Social identity and normative conceptual frameworks, we will discuss why it is important to consider this rather neglected topic in the collective action literature by presenting and discussing recent experimental and longitudinal studies supporting the importance of doing it.

Estimating Labour Supply and Informality Elasticities Using Tax-benefit Variation in Latin America

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 6 December 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields G20

Speakers:
Dr Xavier Jara, Research Officer, LSE III
Professor Olivier Bargain, Professor of Economics, University of Bordeaux

Chair:
Professor Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

Tax systems are already in place in Latin America and are constantly expanding in order to finance increasing public spending. Numerous cash transfer programs also exist and social programs are being scaled up in many places. However, these countries face the constraint of a large and persistent informal sector. Compared to Western countries where redistributive systems may discourage employment (relative to living on welfare), direct progressive taxation in Latin America may reinforce the disincentives to work formally and might reduce the tax base. Social insurances or benefits that are universal and not attached to formal employment may also reduce the necessity to be formally employed. This talk suggests a large-scale investigation of the employment response in general, and the informal employment response in particular, to tax-benefit policies using spatial and time variation in Latin American redistributive systems.

The emergence of a social decolonisation: the question of social change in the French West Indies after World War II

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 29 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Maël Lavenaire, Research Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr George Kunnath, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

The social change which takes place in the French West Indies after World War II is essentially generated by a sociohistorical interaction between various elements of change observed from 1946 to 1961. Here we refer to the new political status of French Department allowed by a global context, the outbreak of social movements involved in the process of decolonisation, public policies and a specific planning of “economic and social development” as well as the population growth with the emergence of a new generation from a sociological viewpoint. This interactionist process conducts to the new type of society emerging in the French West Indies since the 1960’s, without drastically changing their colonial social structure and racial inequalities. This singular transformation is characterised by new social frustrations, while maintaining existing frustrations that stemmed from slavery legacies in spite of the overall significant improvement of the living conditions.

The Impact of Caste and Untouchability: A Missing Link in the Literature on Stunting in India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 22 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Professor Ashwini Deshpande, Professor of Economics and Founding Director, Centre for Economic Data and Analysis (CEDA), Ashoka University, India

Chair:
Professor Naila Kabeer, Professor of Gender and Development, Department of Gender Studies, LSE

India is home to nearly a third of all stunted children. Previous research has overlooked the critical role of caste and the stigmatizing practice of untouchability in shaping incidence of stunting: upper caste (UC) Hindu children are 57% less likely to be stunted than the low-ranked Scheduled Caste (SCs) children. We document the strong negative correlation between the prevalence of the self-professed practice of untouchability and gaps in stunting rates between the UC-Hindu and SC children. The historical geographical span of Hinduism was bounded to the south by the Vindhya Mountain range. Hence, untouchability and caste practices were more rigid to the North of the Vindhya range, directly under the influence of the Indo-Aryan social order. Our estimates show that the SC children living to the south of the Vindhya range are around 30% taller, and have 40% lower levels of stunting, than their counterparts living to the north.

Social Reproduction and Domestic Service: An International Comparison

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 15 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Marion Lieutaud, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, LSE Department of Methodology and Visiting Fellow, LSE III
Dr Paul Segal, Reader in Economics of Development, Department of International Development, Kings College London and Visiting Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Across the world, over 75 million people are domestic workers for private households (ILO 2021). Previous scholarship has unveiled their working conditions and transnational lives, and how domestic work is built on global inequalities (Parreñas 2015). This paper looks at the households who employ these workers, to understand the context, conditions and inequalities that make it possible for some families to purchase the reproductive labour (housework and carework) of others. Households divide this labour between family, community, the market, and the state. How they do this depends on factors including the extent of state provision of care services, and the degree of economic inequality. In order to identify and weigh these different dimensions, we consider a sample of 8 countries (4 Western European countries; 3 Eastern European countries including Russia; and Mexico) and we use a combination of time-use and expenditure data from cross-national surveys and national surveys.

Multidimensional measurement tool for social security framework assessment: Conceptualisation, construction and comparison

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 8 November 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Ashish Dongare, Sir Ratan Tata Postdoctoral Fellow, LSE III

Chair:
Professor Francisco H.G. Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and Director, LSE III

Needless to mention that there exists a strong interconnectedness between various social security programs and their outcomes are also interlinked. Thus, a holistic approach for review and assessment of social security framework is of vital importance. This research aims at providing a measurement tool for assessment of social security framework to enable optimal allocation and utilisation of available resources.

It involves conceptualisation of Multidimensional Social Security Index (MSSI) covering various aspects of social protection including income security, health security, education security. For this purpose, sub-indices representing broader areas of social security are constructed and indicators are curated to evaluate such sub-indices on the basis of parameters like adequacy, coverage, etc. The sensitivity analysis for robustness check of this newly constructed index has been conducted. Further, a case study of India has been undertaken to check the practical application and to assess the status of safety net at selected states in India.

Using Machine Learning to Decompose Inequality: The Case of Opportunity in South Africa

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Pedro Salas-Rojo, Research Officer, LSE III

Chair:
Dr Paolo Brunori, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III

According to a widespread view a society achieves equality of opportunity when individuals exerting the same effort obtain the same outcomes regardless of circumstances that they cannot control such as gender, race, and socioeconomic background. This view was formalized by John Roemer in a number of influential contributions. We illustrate an exact analogy between how the phenomenon of inequality of opportunity may be measured and how transformation trees - a machine learning algorithm developed by Hothorn and Zeileis (2021) predicts an output variable based on a set of features. Then, we use data from South Africa (2017) to analyze inequality of opportunity. Our estimates show that the magnitude of this phenomenon is much greater than what has been suggested in the past. Limiting the analysis to only three circumstances - race, parental education and occupation - the Gini of inequality of opportunity ascends to 0.45, twice as large as previously estimated.

Challenges Facing Liberal Democracies: Citizenship and civil society confronting growing inequality

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Professor Thomas P. Boje, Professor, Department of Social Science and Business, Roskilde University

Chair:
Dr Armine Ishkanian, Executive Director of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity Programme, LSE III, Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy

Some of the crucial challenges facing all liberal democracies in their aspiration for social cohesion and solidarity are how to provide the conditions for individuals to be active, participative citizens. In other words, how to provide opportunities and frameworks for citizens to be involved in mutual social and cultural relationships and for society and the collective to show solidarity with disadvantaged groups. In this seminar, Professor Thomas P. Boje will discuss some of the major challenges facing today’s liberal democracies when it comes to growing inequality, restrictions on citizenship rights, growing polarization in civic activism and the impact of globalization on citizens’ empowerment.

Mobilising Productive Subjectivities: Transnational production and social reproduction in unequal Europe

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 11 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Ania Plomien, Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies, LSE

Chair:
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III

Drawing on an ongoing collaborative project (with Dr Gregory Schwarz) on transnational labour mobility with Polish and Ukrainian migrants working in the food, housing and care sectors in Germany, Poland, and the UK, this event interrogates the dialectical relationship between (global) forces of production and (local) necessities of social reproduction.

The event focuses on the gendered lived experiences of labouring subjectivities of transnational workers, as they confront the necessities of provisioning in a field increasingly dominated by market (vis-à-vis state and household) resourcing. Plomien considers the role that different historico-culturally constituted ‘productive subjectivities’ play in facilitating the social reproduction of European capitalism and draw out the implications for gender inequality, the extent to which inequalities are being accommodated and re-inscribed, rather than transformed.

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Evaluating Allocations of Opportunities

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 4 October 12.30pm to 1.30pm. Online and in-person public event. LSE Centre Building, Room 2.05.

Speaker:
Dr Francesco Andreoli, Associate Professor of Economic Policy, University of Verona

Chair:
Professor Johannes Spinnewijn, Public Economics of Inequality Research Programme Leader, LSE III and Professor of Economics, LSE

This event will provide a robust criterion for comparing lists of probability distributions - interpreted as allocations of opportunities - faced by different social groups. Borrowing from decision making under objective ambiguity, we argue in favour of comparing those collections of probability distributions on the basis of a uniform - among groups - valuation of the expected utility associated to these distributions. We identify an empirically implementable criterion for comparing these lists of probability distributions - conic extension of Zonotope inclusion - that is agreed upon by all conceivable such valuations that exhibit aversion toward inequality of opportunities. We illustrate our criterion by evaluating allocations of educational opportunities among castes and genders in different Indian states.

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Understanding Inequality in India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 27 September. In-person and online public event. 

Speaker:
Professor Reetika Khera, Narendra and Chandra Singhi Chair Professor, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.

Chair:
Professor Sumi Madhok, Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies, LSE

The difficulties in measuring inequality in India, given the paucity of data and the compounding effects of social inequality on economic inequality, have been commented upon. Given these constraints, several scholars have documented the very high, and possibly rising, levels of economic inequality in India.

This talk turns the focus to the lack of recognition of the scale of the problem, especially among the rich/ elite in India. The issue requires urgent attention because the proliferation of digital technologies in basic education and health care is likely to exacerbate inequalities in the long run. The widespread misperception among India's rich/ elite that they are 'middle class' contributes to the lack of policy action, including action on fairer taxation policies in the country.

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Of Victims, Sisters and Caring: Anti-trafficking, State and the Sex Workers’ Movement in Sonagachi

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 June 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event.

Speakers: 
Dr Simanti Dasgupta, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Dayton
Dr Samita Sen, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge 

Chair: 
Dr Shalini Grover, Research Fellow, LSE III 

Based on ethnographic work with Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (Durbar), a grassroots female sex work organization in Sonagachi, Kolkata, this seminar will examine the politics of care in anti-trafficking work. While anti-trafficking (specifically, the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act, ITPA), as a state surveillance apparatus, is ostensibly rooted in caring about and for ‘victims’, the legal construction of the victim itself, within a carceral framework, is often tantamount to the violence of care. However, the care work that has emerged in the Self-Regulatory Board founded by Durbar in 1997 to prevent trafficking in Sonagachi is based on the sex workers’ shared experiences of rural-urban migration, forced displacement and, above all, labour and the search for livelihood. Yet, such spaces of care are both hidden and even devalued in terms of social reproduction.

Prioritarianism in Practice

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 31 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Speakers: 
Professor Matthew Adler, Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy, Duke University
Professor Francisco Ferreira, Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director

Chair: 
Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch, Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III and Global Professor, British Academy 

“Prioritarianism in Practice” is an international group of scholars who aim to develop the theory and application of prioritarianism. This group has just published a substantial volume, Prioritarianism in Practice, including both theoretical chapters and chapters covering the application of prioritarianism to various policy domains (taxation, health care, fatality risk regulation, climate change, education, and the COVID-19 pandemic) and its use in measuring social progress.  Professor Adler, one of the volume’s editors, will give an overview of the book. Professor Ferreira, a co-author of the chapter on “Equality of Opportunity,” will discuss how prioritarianism can be extended to take account of individual responsibility.

Social reproduction and care: what’s in a name? 

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 24 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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Speaker: 
Sara Farris, Reader in Sociology, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths 

Discussant: 
Professor Naila Kabeer, Faculty Associate, III and Professor of Gender and Development, Department of Gender Studies and Department of International Development, LSE

Chair: 
Professor Alpa Shah, Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology and Convenor Global Economies of Care Research Theme, LSE III 

In the last few years, and particularly during the pandemic,  the concept of care and the concept of social reproduction have come to the front of feminist and political debates. Both concepts are often used as synonyms to refer to the type of labour undertaken by racialised women in European societies.  Yet, the two concepts do not describe exactly the same thing; some of the scholars that use them are keen to draw distinctions. Against this background, Sara Farris will present an initial review of the debate and argue that one of the main distinctions between the two lies in the ways in which these frameworks view, or instead disavow, antagonism and ambivalence, as well as negative affect, in the context of capitalist social formations. 

Citizenship 4 Sale: Millionaires, Microstates, and Mobility

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 17 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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Speaker: 
Dr Kristin Surak, Assistant Professor in Sociology, Department of Sociology, LSE 

Chair: 
Professor Mike Savage, Martin White Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Convenor Cities, Jobs and Economic Change Research Theme, LSE III 

Citizenship is often seen as a sacred bond between sovereign and subject, a key locus of identity in the modern world. Yet over the past ten years, several small countries have begun to sell it outright – and for remarkable sums – through formal, government-run programs. Yet why would anyone want to put down $2 million for membership in a microstate? We may think of citizenship as fundamentally about rights and identity, but for many, citizenship is a ticket. It’s not about the privileges it secures within the granting state, but those it brings rights outside it, usually in visa-free travel, business opportunities, and sometimes residence option in other countries. The result gives powerful third countries considerable sway over the value of what is at heart a sovereign prerogative.  It also makes for a rollercoaster of a market in citizenship, for not only politics but – more often than not – geopolitics determines its dynamics.  Drawing on five years of fieldwork in sixteen countries on four continents, this talk traces the emergence and operation of this intriguing global scene. 

The Evolution of Black Neighborhoods in the U.S., 1970-2020

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 10 May 2022, 12:30 to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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Speaker: 
Professor Michael Lens,  Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, Luskin School of Public Affairs, UCLA 

Chair:
Professor Neil Lee, Professor of Economic Geography, Department of Geography and Environment and Convenor, Cities, Jobs and Economic Change Research Theme, LSE III 

Although there is an extensive literature on racial segregation in the United States, and a number of chronicles of Black life in American cities, there are few quantitative studies of Black neighborhoods. In this seminar, Professor Lens discusses his project which aims to fill these gaps by systematically describing the characteristics and trajectories of predominantly Black neighborhoods in the United States, beginning in 1970 — a key inflection point for the Black neighborhood and urban America more broadly.

‘The Library Is like a Mother’: arrival infrastructures and migrant newcomers in East London 

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 22 March 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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It is often assumed that migrants settle into contexts populated by national majorities or co-ethnics. Yet new migrants often move into ‘arrival areas’ settled by previous migrants from various backgrounds. Such arrival areas can typically be found at the margins of ‘arrival cities’ which have seen immigration (and emigration) over many decades. Past movements bequeath a wealth of ‘arrival infrastructures’, consisting of institutions, organisations, social spaces and actors which specifically facilitate arrival. These include, for example, shops as information hubs, religious sites, language classes, and hairdressers, often established by people with migration backgrounds. 

This seminar develops the idea of arrival infrastructures as local ‘social infrastructure ecosystems’ in which knowledge and resources between long-established residents (including migrants) and newcomers are exchanged. It looks at the interactions and transfer of knowledge and resources between long-established migrants and more recent newcomers through arrival infrastructures and how these shape migrant inclusion and exclusion. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in East London (UK), the seminar investigates how newcomers access settlement information and the role played by arrival infrastructures in this process. It aims to open up debate about arrival infrastructures, their manifestation in different urban contexts, and their relation to migrant social mobility. 

Speaker: Professor Susanne Wessendorf (Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University)

Chair: Professor Alpa Shah (Department of Anthropology and Convenor Global Economies of Care Research Theme, LSE III)

Multidimensional Quality of Employment (QoE) Dynamics: evidence from men and women in Chile

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 15 March 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

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Speaker: Dr Joaquin Prieto-Suarez (Research Officer, LSE III)

Chair: Dr Berkay Ozcan (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

In recent years, conventional labour market studies have focused not only on the number of jobs and their employment and unemployment indicators, but also on identifying whether jobs are good or bad. Scholars have raised the relevance of studying the quality of employment in emerging countries based on the realisation that economic growth alone does not necessarily improve employment conditions and that social insurance systems cannot be built on precarious labour markets.

This seminar proposes a framework to analyse the quality of employment (QoE) from a multidimensional (income, stability and conditions) and longitudinal perspective. A dynamic analysis of the QoE provides an understanding of which workers appear to become “stuck” in poor quality jobs and which workers succeed in moving into higher-quality jobs. It also enables examining whether the QoE dynamics of men and women differ. 

Crunch Time: how married couples confront unemployment 

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 8 March 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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In this talk, based on her book, Crunch Time, Aliya Hamid Rao gets up close and personal with college-educated, unemployed men, women, and spouses in the U.S. to explain how comparable men and women have starkly different experiences of unemployment. Traditionally gendered understandings of work—that it’s a requirement for men and optional for women—loom large in this process, even for marriages that had been not organized in gender-traditional ways. These beliefs serve to make men’s unemployment an urgent problem, while women’s unemployment—cocooned within a narrative of staying at home—is almost a non-issue. Crunch Time reveals the minutiae of how gendered norms and behaviours are actively maintained by spouses at a time when they could be dismantled, and how gender is central to the ways couples react to and make sense of unemployment.

Speaker: Dr Aliya Rao (Department of Methodology, LSE)

Chair: Dr Shalini Grover (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Mountain Tales: love and loss in the municipality of castaway belongings

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 8 February 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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Speaker: Saumya Roy (Co-Founder, Vandana Foundation)

Discussant: Dr George Kunnath (Research Fellow, LSE III) 

Chair: Dr Shalini Grover (Research Fellow, LSE III) 

In this event, author, journalist and activist Saumya Roy will discuss her new book, Mountain Tales, which explores the "noxious and wonderful world" of Maximum City's rising mountains of garbage and the waste pickers who trawl through them.

The towering garbage mountains are reflections of modern India and provide a window into local and global inequalities that arise from overconsumption, pollution, climate change and poverty. Saumya Roy will be in conversation with Dr George Kunnath about the truths that are unravelled through the stories of the small, forgotten community that lives and works amongst Mumbai's castaway belongings.

Global Wealth, Gender and Carbon Injustice: new findings from the World Inequality Report 2022

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 1 February 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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The presentation will discuss the key findings of the World Inequality Report 2022, by the report's lead author, Lucas Chancel. The report draws from the work of a network of over 100 researchers affiliated with the World Inequality Database, who track economic inequality in its various forms. The 2022 edition presents novel results on global wealth inequalities, gender gaps and ecological inequalities.

“Read this report, shout out its messages, find ways to act upon it.” - Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.

"If one lesson emerges from the richness of the data presented in this report, it is that human societies can choose how much inequality they generate through social and public policy. The report is a world map and a roadmap as to how." - Emmanuel Saez.

Speaker: Dr Lucas Chancel (World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics)  

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director) 

The Impact of COVID-19 on Global Inequality and Poverty

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 25 January 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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Read the slides here

COVID-19 has had catastrophic economic consequences worldwide. This presentation tries to quantify the consequences of the pandemic on global inequality and poverty in 2020.

To this end, a combination of data sources is used including (i) actual income data from National Statistical Offices, (ii) high-frequency phone surveys, (iii) estimates from literature, and (iv) sectoral and aggregate GDP growth forecasts from national accounts. Results suggest that the world in 2020 witnessed the largest increases to global inequality and poverty since at least 1990. These findings are primarily driven by country-level shocks to average incomes and an increase in between-country inequality. Increases in between-country inequality are driven by the finding that middle-income countries were hit hardest. Changes in within-country inequality were relatively modest, particularly in high-income countries, many of which saw inequality decline in 2020.

Speaker: Dr Nishant Yonzan (Poverty and Inequality team, World Bank Group) 

Chair: Dr Paolo Brunori (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III)

Unfair Health Inequalities in the UK

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 18 January 2022, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

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In this seminar, Dr Paolo Brunori will discuss his recent paper in which he measures unfair health inequality in the UK using a novel data-driven empirical approach. He shows that unfair inequality is a substantial fraction of the total explained health variability (health variability being the result of circumstances beyond individual control and health-related behaviours). This finding holds no matter which exact definition of fairness is adopted: using both the fairness gap and direct unfairness measures, each evaluated at different reference values for circumstances or effort.

Speaker: Dr Paolo Brunori (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III) 

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

Is there a 'Grand Gender Convergence' in 21st Century Canada? The Jury is still out

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 7 December, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Gender equity in the labour market has been an issue in western economies since the mid 19th century. Much progress has been made since that time and has been dubbed the “The Grand Gender Convergence”. However, recently concern has been expressed as to whether the progress has stalled. In the absence of gender discrimination within the context of an equal opportunity paradigm, if willingness to work and acquire human resources is similarly distributed across the gender divide, females and males with similar human resource stocks should have similar income distributions. Here, new techniques are introduced for examining the convergence of male and female resources and outcomes which are exemplified in an analysis of gender convergence in Canada’s 21st Century labour market 

Speaker: Professor Gordon Anderson (University of Toronto)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director)

Watch the video here

Listen to the podcast here

Read the slides here

Does Dual Citizenship Reproduce Inequalities?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 30 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Robtel Neajai Pailey grapples with this question and more in her engaging monograph Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Hers is the first book to evaluate domestic and diasporic constructions and practices of Liberian citizenship across space and time and their myriad implications for development.

In this seminar drawing on rich life histories from over two hundred in-depth interviews in West Africa, Europe, and North America, Pailey uses a contested dual citizenship bill, introduced in Liberia in 2008 but never passed, as an entry point to ask broader questions about how citizenship is differentiated by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc, and whether dual citizenship actually reproduces inequalities. She develops a new model for conceptualising citizenship within the context of ‘crisis’-affected states while offering a compelling critique of the neoliberal framing of diasporas and donors as the panacea to post-war reconstruction.

Speaker: Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer for the Atlantic Fellows in Social and Economic Equity programme, LSE III)

Watch the video here

Shackled in Debt: Global Capitalism, Economic Crisis and Penal Politics in Greece

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 23 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

An important body of scholarly work has been produced over the last two decades to explain variation in levels and patterns of state punishment across and within different countries around the world, especially with regard to imprisonment policies and practices. Two variables that have evaded systematic attention in this regard are, first, the orientation of incumbent governments along the political spectrum, and second, the experience and fiscal implications of national economic downturn. Although recent years have seen both variables receive somewhat greater consideration, there is still precious little research into the effects on state punishment that they have in interaction with one another. Because the few available studies touching on the matter have been preoccupied with the Anglo-American sphere and only in the context of recent decades at that, even less is known either about the implications that different types or experiences of economic crisis carry for state punishment, or about the influence exerted in this respect by government political orientations other than those found in established long-established democracies. Irrespective of geographical or temporal scope, moreover, the impact that different extranational factors and actors may have in terms of economic, political or directly penal matters domestically is still poorly understood. 

In addressing this gap in the literature, this seminar identifies the direction and assesses the extent of influence exerted by government political orientation and by economic downturn upon the evolution of incarceration and other forms of state punishment in the context of two economic crises in Greece: the first experienced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the second one in the 2010s. 

Speaker: Dr Leonidas Cheliotis (Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Chair: Dr Fabrício Mendes Fialho (Research Officer, LSE III)

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New Estimates of Inequality of Opportunity Across European Cohorts

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 16 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

This seminar, based on a study of the same name, provides a set of new estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) in Europe, using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Condition (EU-SILC). Unlike previous research, inequality of opportunity is estimated within birth cohorts, which is argued to be the  appropriate population level for inequality of opportunity analysis. Most IOp measures require estimation of the conditional distribution of the outcome of interest given circumstances. With multiple circumstances and the sample sizes available in EU-SILC, distribution regression methods are used and combined with local kernel weighting to show how these can be used to estimate a large set of IOp measures. Endowed with cohort-level estimates of IOp, the relationship between educational policy variables measured at the time of parental education and offspring generation inequality of opportunity in adulthood are examined. A negative relationship between the duration of compulsory education of the parents and IOp among offspring is found, but the relationship is weak.

Speaker: Professor Philippe Van Kerm (University of Luxembourg)

Chair: Dr Paolo Brunori (Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE III)

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Read the slides here

Political Equality: what is it and why does it matter?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 9 November, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Commentators and researchers have largely studied inequality, both theoretically and empirically, using a distributional framework. In economics, the focus has mainly been on differences in income and wealth, thus putting the distribution of utility or welfare, and its dependence on material factors, front and centre. This has motivated much statistical work on the measurement of inequality, such as changes in the Gini coefficient or ratios of resource ownership between groups (e.g. 90:10 ratios). In political philosophy and political science, the emphasis in studies of (political) inequality has been on analysing the skewed distribution of power in society, although no parallel literature on measurement has emerged to date. This too is consequently a study of distribution, thereby creating a common thread across the social sciences.

Our focus in this paper is on equal consideration as an ideal for political equality. This is distinct from economic equality and has parallels to discussions of relational equality.  We argue that political inequality is a distinctive type of inequality. First, it cannot be reduced to the factors that routinely go into thinking about economic inequality. Second, its currency is performative, not distributive and is fundamentally about the nature and quality of social relations; politics is intrinsically process-oriented, comprising various “political transactions” between citizens, representatives, and interest groups, among others. Thus, to understand political equality, we need to appreciate how individuals relate to one another through the democratic process. We argue that there are two core dimensions that can usefully be studied to bring these ideas to life empirically: patterns of political participation and political representation.  Studying these reinforce the idea that, even in advanced democracies, politics is an elite activity concentrated among the educated and those with material resources.  We then unpack when this is damaging to achieving “equal consideration” and discuss a range of reforms throughout history that have been proposed to promote political equality through this lens. 

Please note that this event will not be recorded.

Speaker: Professor Tim Besley (Department of Economics, LSE)

Chair: Professor Alpa Shah (Convenor Global Economies of Care Research Theme and Professor in Anthropology, Department of Anthropology)

Is Inequality a Side Effect of Central Bank Independence?

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 26 October, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Since the 1980s, income inequality has increased substantially in several countries. This event is based on a paper that builds a theory linking these dynamics to central bank independence. We posit the existence of three mechanisms that indirectly tie central bank independence to inequality. First, central bank independence constrains fiscal policy and weakens a government's ability to engage in redistribution. Second, central bank independence incentivizes governments to deregulate financial markets, which generates a boom in asset values and increases non-wage returns. Third, to contain unemployment, governments actively promote policies that weaken the bargaining power of workers. Together, these policies strengthen secular trends towards higher within-country inequality.

Empirically, the analysis finds a strong relationship between central bank independence and inequality, as well as a varying degree of support for each of the three mechanisms. From a policy perspective, our findings contribute to knowledge on the undesirable side effects of central bank independence.

Speaker: Dr Andreas Kern (Georgetown University)

Chair: Dr Joaquin Prieto (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Read the slides here

Feminist Readings of COVID-19: a conversation

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 19 October, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted profoundly the ways in which we labour and live. It has revealed the centrality of care and social reproduction for the functioning of our economy. Moreover, it has clearly revealed the strength of feminist understandings of the world economy, including their focus on the world of work, households and care, and collective action.

This panel is organised as a conversation exploring the gendered impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods, life-making sectors, the world of work. Themes explored include the differential impact of the pandemic on women, the restructuring of social reproduction, and the rise of novel work dichotomies such as 'essential' and 'non-essential' work. The panel will also explore which policies and practices are likely to centre the post-pandemic recovery on gendered labour, care, and social reproduction. 

Speakers: Professor Naila Kabeer (Department of Gender Studies, LSE), Dr Alessandra Mezzadri (Department of Development Studies, SOAS) and Dr Sara Stevano (Department of Economics, SOAS)

Chair: Shalini Grover, (Research Fellow, LSE III)

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Researching Race and Racial Inequality in the UK Film Industry 

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 12 October, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

The growth of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) over the past 20 years has coincided with an increased awareness of and research on prevalent racial inequalities in the sector. This has included studies on how Black and ethnic minority people are included in, represented by and experience the UK film industry in particular. Using a unique dataset, major new research undertaken by Dr Clive Nwonka (University College London) and Professor Sarita Malik (Brunel University London) in collaboration with the British Film Institute is exploring the relationship between racial inequality, diversity and cultural policy in the UK film sector by researching through both quantitative and qualitative modes how factors such as regionality, genre have challenged how we must interpret data-led approaches to the study of racial and ethnic difference within the sector and the role of testimony in understanding the nature of discriminatory institutional cultures and practices.

Arguing for a social policy approach to how we understand racial inequalities in the UK film sector and its connected industries, this seminar presentation allows for an exploration of how a mixed methodological approach drawing from film studies, cultural studies, media and communications as well as sociological frames are crucial to a critical understanding of the multi-dimensional forms of racial inequality in the UK film industries. The seminar will also consider the historical significance of British film culture and industry as a site of racial struggle and contestation, the political discourses the language and practice of ‘cultural diversity’ and ‘structural racism’ have and continue to be embedded in, and the various ways in which current research seeks to decouple ‘diversity work’ from anti-racism and the implications of such a critical shift in informing inclusion policy strategies.  

Speakers: Dr Clive Nwonka (Visiting Fellow, LSE III; University College London) and Professor Sarita Malik (Brunel University London) 

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Caste, Class and Social Mobility in Palanpur

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 28 September, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Since its independence (1947), India has undergone profound social, political and economic transformations driven by the agrarian reforms in the 1950s, the Green Revolution in the 1970s and the neoliberal turn in the 1990s. While these changes have contributed to the economic development of the country, it is less clear to what extent better opportunities for social mobility opened up to individuals, particularly those from groups historically disadvantaged by their caste position. Previous large-scale studies of social mobility in India have been limited by the lack of intergenerational data and the impossibility to disaggregate administrative caste categories into jatis (birth-ascribed endogamous groups).

This talk is based on a study that partly overcomes these limits using unique individual-level data for the entire population of Palanpur (a North Indian village surveyed seven times from 1958 to 2015). Combining a quantitative analysis of trends, patterns and determinants of social mobility across three generations of individuals with a qualitative analysis of 102 semi-structured interviews carried out in 2018 during six-month fieldwork, the study aims at verifying whether social mobility has increased over time and whether caste, at the jati level, continues to be a determinant factor of social (im)mobility. 

Speaker: Dr Floriane Bolazzi (Università degli Studi di Milano)

Chair: Professor Nicholas Stern (Chair of the Grantham Research Institute, LSE)

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Intergenerational Transfers, Wealth and Gender in Britain

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 25 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

This talk will investigate the impact of intergenerational wealth transfers on wealth levels and inequality, exploiting rich household survey data. It will analyse patterns of intergenerational transfer receipt by gender, and assesses the extent to which differences in the scale and nature of these receipts contribute to the gender wealth gap. 

Speakers: Brian Nolan (Professor of Social Policy, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford) and Juan Palomino (Research Officer, Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director) 

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Download presentation slides here

Faces of Inequality: a mixed methods approach to multidimensional inequalities

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 18 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

This paper, co-authored with Dr Ingrid Bleynat,   presents a new mixed methods approach to measuring and understanding multidimensional inequality, and applies it to new data for Mexico City. Quantitative and qualitative dimensions of inequality are incorporated, integrating the concerns of both economists and sociologists.

This portrayal of inequality combines the representativeness of quantitative approaches with the depth and nuance of qualitative analyses of lived experience, habitus, and social relations.

Speaker: Paul Segal (Reader in Economics of Development, Department of International Development at King's College London)

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Refusing Discriminatory Technologies of Power: racial justice and the challenge of hi-tech policing

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 11 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

From informational capitalism to biased code, technological systems increasingly form part of larger structures of oppression and domination. This talk tackles the topic of technology, injustice, and inequity with a focus on bottom-up practices of resistance, rejection, and refusal of digital and automated systems that increasingly govern people’s lives.

Drawing from examples of data-driven policing in Europe and the United States, this talk explores the narrative, technical, and political challenges faced by members of affected communities - especially minoritised and racialised communities - in countering these discriminatory technologies of power. Given these challenges, what can affected communities learn from other practices of technological refusal?

Speaker: Dr Seeta Peña Gangadharan (Associate Professor, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)

Chair: Professor Ellen Helsper (Research Theme Convenor (Politics of Inequality); Professor in Digital Inequalities, Department of Media and Communications, LSE)

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Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950-2020

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 4 May 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people are rich in the space of capital and labor income. In this talk, survey and administrative data is combined to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States since 1950, finding that the increase in labor income inequality contributed to the rising homoploutia, which in turn explains 20% of the increase in interpersonal income inequality since 1986.

Speaker: Yonatan Berman (Research Fellow, London Mathematical Laboratory)

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Anonymous and Non-Anonymous Growth Incidence Curves in the United States, 1968-2016

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 30 March 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

This paper combines cross-sectional and longitudinal labor income data to present a comparison between anonymous and non-anonymous growth incidence curves in the United States during the past 50 years. If anonymous growth incidence tend to be upward sloping because of increasing inequality during that period, the same is not true of non-anonymous curves, which prove to be at or non-significantly downward sloping, suggesting some neutrality of growth when initial income positions are accounted for. This is true when using either the PSID data or synthetic panels based on CPS data and one-parameter functional representations of income mobility. Flat non-anonymous curves are observed even in periods of increasing cross-sectional income inequality. Differences between anonymous and non-anonymous curves thus matter for the interpretation of inequality changes, social welfare and policy.

Speaker: Professor François Bourguignon (Emeritus Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics) 

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies and LSE III Director) 

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When Violence Endures: inequality, resistance, and repression in India's Maoist guerrilla zones

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 23 March 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

This paper engages with the concept of violence in the context of the ongoing Maoist insurgency and counterinsurgency in India. During the five-decade-long armed conflict involving the Maoist guerrillas and the landless/poor peasants on the one side, and the state security forces and upper-caste/private militias on the other, violence has taken multiple forms. It has spiralled, giving rise to new formations and new theatres of war, especially in the forested areas which are home to indigenous populations. In this paper, I attempt to conceptualise this enduring violence and reflect on the possibility of resolutions, drawing on twenty years of my research in conflict-affected regions in India, and recently in Colombia. Employing the framework of the ‘Spiral of Violence’ developed by Helder Camara (1909–1999), a Brazilian liberation theologian, I explore the many faces of violence as manifested in a continuum of structural inequality, resistance and repression. As there has been no meaningful transition from violence to peace in India’s guerrilla zones, I draw on a comparative model, and discuss the insights that the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia might provide for India. In Colombia, also ravaged by the cycle of violence, the peace agreement between the FARC and the state facilitated the end of a similarly long-lasting armed conflict. The comprehensive peace process in Colombia, in spite of its setbacks, has demonstrated that without addressing the persisting inequalities, the spiral of violence cannot be broken. What could India learn from the achievements and pitfalls of the Colombian model?

Speaker: Dr George Kunnath (Research Fellow, LSE III)

Chair: Professor Ellen Helsper (Research Theme Convenor (Politics of Inequality) and Professor in Digital Inequalities at the Department of Media and Communications)

Households, Inequalities and Care: lockdown experiences from the UK, New Zealand and India

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 09 March 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

This event will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the need to centre an understanding of the household in policy-making and politics if we are to mitigate inequalities. It will do so by unveiling the insights of immersive anthropological research on the impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns as experienced in the UK, New Zealand and India. It will explore the inequalities, in particular an informal and formal care deficit generated by UK national and local lockdowns, along with the problematic assumptions about the household and community in COVID-19 policy interventions in the UK. It will analyse the success, but also the limitations, of bubble policies in the New Zealand as a strategy for allowing citizens to support loved ones living beyond their immediate residence whilst nevertheless preventing the spread of COVID-19. And it will highlight the significance of the spatio-temporal division of households that were at the heart of the plight of the hundreds of thousands of migrant labourers who took to their feet and marched home when the lockdowns were called in India. Overall, we will suggest alternative approaches to policy and politics grounded in anthropological insights and methods.

Speakers: Dr Alpa Shah (Associate Professor of Anthropology; Research Theme leader of ‘Global Economies of Care’, III, LSE), Professor Laura Bear (Professor of Anthropology, LSE), Dr Nick Long (Associate Professor of Anthropology, LSE)

Chair: Dr Insa Koch (Associate Professor of Law and Anthropology)

Watch the video here

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Find Laura Bear's report summary here

Find Nick Long's report here

Find Alpa Shah's article here

The Changing Geography of Social Mobility in the United States

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 16 February 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event.

New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility – the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder – varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing new data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the twentieth century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal inequality that have “deep roots” generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it, and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.

Speaker: Dr Dylan Connor (Assistant Professor at School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University) 

Chair: Dr Neil Cummins (Associate Professor of Economic History, LSE)

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The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 02 February 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

The last 40 years have seen a substantial fall in taxes on the rich across the OECD countries. This coincided with a period of rising income inequality, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Given the difficulties of establishing causality from cross-country panel studies, however, the extent to which tax cuts on the rich have driven up income inequality remains an open empirical question. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature by using new matching techniques for panel data to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts on the rich on income inequality. As proponents of tax cuts on the rich often argue for their beneficial effects on economic performance due to efficiency gains and the reduction of behavioural distortions, we also estimate the effects of major tax cuts on the rich on economic growth and unemployment. Our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment. Overall, this new research suggests that lower taxes on the rich have made a significant contribution to increased income inequality in the OECD countries since the 1980s, with no offsetting gains in economic performance.

Speakers: Dr David Hope (Department of Political Economy, Kings College London, Visiting Research Fellow, International Inequalities Institute), Dr Julian Limberg (Department of Political Economy, Kings College London)

Chair: Dr Luna Glucksberg (Research Fellow, LSE III)

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The unintended consequences of quantifying quality: Does ranking school performance shape the geographical concentration of advantage? 

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 26 January 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

Based on a paper of the same name, this talk will investigate whether quantifying school performance can have the perverse consequence of increasing the spatial concentration of advantage.

Combining research on residential segregation with the sociology of quantification, the writers argue that ranking school performance may induce affluent parents to sort into areas with higher ranked schools. This hypothesis is explored by analysing whether the introduction of league tables measuring school performance in the early 1990s in the UK affected the spatial concentration of advantage. The writers find that quantifying school quality has the unintended consequence of increasing the geographical concentration of advantage, potentially entrenching poverty and inequality.  

Speakers: Dr Aaron Reeves (Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University, and a Visiting Senior Fellow in the International Inequalities Institute), Daniel McArthur (Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University) 

Chair: Dr Nora Waitkus (Research Officer, LSE III)

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Read the slides here

Apocalypse or new dawn? Social mobility, inequality and education in the post-COVID era

Part of the III Inequalities Seminar Series 

Tuesday 19 January 2021, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event. 

What are the prospects for social mobility in the wake of the Covid pandemic? Britain’s first Professor of Social Mobility will assess the future implications of growing educational and societal inequalities, drawing on evidence from the latest research and his new book.

Social mobility can be defined in many ways, but however conceived the dials appear to be pointing in the wrong direction, particularly for ‘Generation Covid’, the under 25s. We are failing the basic fairness test in society: with inequalities so extreme those on the lower rungs of the economic or social ladder face an impossible task in forging a decent life, let alone climbing the ladder. The Covid crisis has highlighted the escalating expectations placed on teachers, and the education system more widely, to solve all of society’s ills.

Building a more mobile and equal society will require radical long-term reforms both outside and inside the school gates, including a one-off progressive wealth tax; guarantees for decent and valuable jobs across all regions of the country; a credible vocational stream linking education and work; more resources for schoolsto tackle social welfare alongside teaching and learning; and a step change in the social mobility approach within universities.

Some scholars predict that society will eventually unravel as the disenfranchised rise up against the elites. But the Covid crisis also offers an historic opportunity to reset society and create a fairer and more sustainable future for all.

Speaker: Professor Lee Elliot-Major (Professor of Social Mobility, University of Exeter) 

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho-Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer, LSE III)

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The Effects of Cash Transfers on Formal Labor Markets: evidence from Brazil 

Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 1 December 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Joana Naritomi (Assistant Professor, Department of International Development, LSE)

Chair: Dr Armine Ishkanian (III Research Theme Convenor (Politics of Inequality), Executive Director AFSEE programme and Associate Professor at the Department of Social Policy, LSE)

Cash transfers have expanded widely in developing countries, and have been credited for a sizable reduction in poverty rates. Yet, the potential unintended consequences of these programs for labor markets have spurred a heated policy debate. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for both individual and aggregate effects of welfare programs in policy debates. 

Found in Translation? Language Legislation and Pro-Social Preferences

Part of the III Seminar Series 

Tuesday 17 November 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Frank A. Cowell (Department of Economics, LSE)

Chair: Professor Francisco Ferreira (Amartya Sen Professor of Inequalities, Director International Inequalities Institute

Language plays a central role in shaping people's identities. In multilingual countries, the legal recognition of a language increases its status; this may influence attitudes towards others and their preferences for redistribution. This paper studies the effect of the progressive introduction of official language recognition (OLR) in Indian states, on pro-social behaviour, including tolerance, willingness to redistribute and unselfishness. The exposure to OLR increases has a significant impact on pro-social behaviour, one that is modified by factors such as whether respondents are Hindi speakers.

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Lives and Livelihoods: estimates of the global mortality and poverty effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

Part of the III Seminar Series 

Tuesday 27 October 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Benoit Decerf (University of Namur)

Chair: Professor Kirsten Sehnbruch (Distinguished Policy Fellow, LSE III)

This event will evaluate the global welfare consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY) to the pandemic.

Three main findings arise. First, as of early June 2020, the pandemic (and the observed private and policy responses) has generated at least 68 million additional poverty years and 4.3 million years of life lost across 150 countries. The ratio of PYs to LYs is very large in most countries, suggesting that the poverty consequences of the crisis are of paramount importance. Second, this ratio declines systematically with GDP per capita: poverty accounts for a much greater share of the welfare costs in poorer countries. Finally, the dominance of poverty over mortality is reversed in a counterfactual “herd immunity” scenario: without any policy intervention, LYs tend to be greater than PYs, and the overall welfare losses are greater.

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Culture Is Bad for You: inequality in the cultural and creative industries

Part of the III Seminar Series 

Tuesday 13 October 2020, 12:30-1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Dr Dave O'Brien (Chancellor’s Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Edinburgh)

Chair: Dr Sara Camacho Felix (Assistant Professorial Lecturer, LSE III)

This talk introduces themes from the book Culture is bad for you. The book analyses some of the connections between culture and social inequality. It presents the first large-scale study of social mobility into cultural and creative jobs, along with hundreds of interviews with cultural workers, and new analysis of secondary datasets. It uses this data to show that who works, and who engages, in culture is deeply unequal.

Alongside these themes, the talk addresses the intersection between class, race and gender underpinning exclusions from the workforce and the audience, demonstrating how women, people of colour, and those from working class origins are systematically excluded.

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Why do people stay poor?

Inequalities Seminar Series

Tuesday 29 September 2020, 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Online public event

Speaker: Professor Oriana Bandiera (Sir Anthony Atkinson Chair in Economics, Director of STICERD)

Chair: Dr Tahnee Ooms (Research Officer, III)

There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent or motivation. The other, poverty traps view, differences in opportunities stemming from differences in wealth.

This study exploits a large-scale, randomized asset transfer and panel data on 6000 households over an 11 year period to test between these two views. The data supports the poverty traps view - identifying a threshold level of initial assets above which households accumulate assets, take on better occupations and grow out of poverty. The reverse happens for those below the threshold. The findings imply that big push policies which transform job opportunities for the poor might represent a permanent solution to the global mass poverty problem.

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