ECON 5180 - Poverty and Inequality

This course focuses on economic inequality within countries and at the global level. The first part of the course is an overview of comparative inequality within countries and its components: inequality between and within capital and labor; the creation, valuation, and persistence of wealth; explanations for unequal labor incomes among workers and between workers and employers; and the combination of capital and labor income inequality in each country’s personal income distribution. The course will then move to a series of topics: 1. Absolute wellbeing and deprivation (poverty), as well as inequality in health and life expectancy as measures of absolute welfare; 2. Inequality by race and gender; 3. Global inequality, mobility of capital and labor between countries, as well as trends in inequality within developing countries, including China, Brazil, and Russia; 4. Social mobility: inheritance of economic status between generations, from parents to children, as well as the societal mechanisms that contribute to or erode it like immigration and higher education. Graduate students should register for 6180 and will be held to higher standards and/or additional work.