In his 1926 short story, “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald observes: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they...

Society often allocates valuable resources such as prestigious positions, salaries, or marriage partners via tournament-like institutions. In such situations, inequality affects incentives to compete and hence has a direct impact on equilibrium choices and hence material outcomes. We introduce a new distinction between inequality in initial endowments (e.g. ability, inherited wealth) and inequa...

This study explores the consequences and origins of between-ethnicity economic inequality across countries. First, combining satellite images of nighttime luminosity with the historical homelands of ethnolinguistic groups we construct measures of ethnic inequality for a large sample of countries. We also compile proxies of overall spatial inequality and regional inequality across administrative...

We give three proofs of a functional inequality for the standard Gaussian measure originally due to William Beckner. The first uses the central limit theorem and a tensorial property of the inequality. The second uses the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck semigroup, and the third uses the heat semigroup. These latter two proofs yield a more general inequality than the one Beckner originally proved. We then ge...

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about economic inequality in India during the post-reform period. We analyze consumption inequality through the hitherto neglected lens of nonfood expenditure. Using household level consumption expenditure data from the quinquennial “thick” rounds of the NSS, we show that inequality within food and non-food groups has declined, even as overall expend...

For bounded non-negative operators A and B, Furuta showed 0 ≤ A ≤ B implies A r 2BA r 2 ≤ (A r 2BA r 2 ) s+r t+r (0 ≤ r, 0 ≤ s ≤ t). We will extend this as follows: 0 ≤ A ≤ B ! λ C (0 < λ < 1) implies A r 2 (λB + (1− λ)C)A r 2 ≤ {A r 2 (λB + (1 − λ)C)A r 2 } s+r t+r , where B ! λ C is a harmonic mean of B and C. The idea of the proof comes from Jensen’s inequality for an operator convex functio...

Focus must be shifted from income inequality to economic inequality because of the presence of causal influences on individual well-being and freedom that are economic in nature but cannot be expounded by simple statistics of incomes and commodity holdings. Attention must be given to heterogeneous magnitudes. Moreover, there is a need for the derivation of partial orderings based on explicit or...

The rapid increase of wealth inequality in the past few decades is one of the most disturbing social and economic issues of our time. Studying its origin and underlying mechanisms is essential for policy aiming to control and even reverse this trend. In that context, controlling the distribution of income, using income tax or other macroeconomic policy instruments, is generally perceived as eff...