wealth concentration over the path of development sweden 1873 2006 we study wealth concentration in sweden over 130 years from the beginning of industrialization until the present day our series are based on new evidence from estate and wealth tax data foreign and domestic family firm wealth and pension wealth estimates we find that swedish wealth concentration was high in the agrarian state and changed little during early industrialization from world war i until about 1950 the richest percentile lost ground to high income earners in the rest of the top wealth decile this equalization continued postwar the entire top decile lost out relative to the rest of the population around 1980 wealth compression stopped and inequality increased we approximate the effects of international flows and find that the recent increase in wealth inequality is probably larger than what official estimates suggest

changes in labor force composition and male earnings a production approach models of aggregate production are estimated and used to investigate the effects of changes in labor force composition on the recently observed decline in the earnings of college graduates relative to other workers and on the fall in the earnings of younger workers relative to older workers changes in labor force composition explain substantial proportions of these observed earnings changes the most important compositional change appears to have been the rapid increase in the number of young male college graduates projections outside the sample are consistent with depressed earnings throughout the lifetimes of the large baby boom cohorts especially among college graduates but do not suggest that depressed college graduate earnings are a permanent phenomenon for all birth cohorts

the effect of cohort size on earnings growth a reexamination of the evidence this study reexamines the effect of cohort size on earnings growth finis welch finds that individuals in larger cohorts experience depressed earnings conditions on entry into the labor market but that their earnings grow at faster rates than in smaller cohorts thus a large portion of the cohort size effect on earnings dissipates after a few years however using data almost identical to those of welch but estimating less restrictive models it is found here that cohort size not only depresses earnings at entry but also seems to slow down early career earnings growth the evidence suggests that earnings ini larger cohorts do not approach normal levels after at brief period in the labor force rather the negative cohort size effect on earnings appears to worsen with experience

tax evasion and inequality this paper attempts to estimate the size and distribution of tax evasion in rich countries we combine random audits the key source used to study tax evasion so far with new micro data leaked from large offshore financial institutions hsbc switzerland swiss leaks and mossack fonseca panama papers matched to population wide wealth records in norway sweden and denmark we find that tax evasion rises sharply with wealth a phenomenon random audits fail to capture on average about 3 of personal taxes are evaded in scandinavia but this figure rises to close to 30 in the top 0 01 of the wealth distribution a group that includes households with more than 45 million in net wealth a simple model of the supply of tax evasion services can explain why evasion rises steeply with wealth taking tax evasion into account increases the rise in inequality seen in tax data since the 1970s markedly highlighting the need to move beyond tax data to capture income and wealth at the top even in countries where tax compliance is generally high we also find that after reducing tax evasion by using tax amnesties tax evaders do not legally avoid taxes more this result suggests that fighting tax evasion can be an effective way to collect more tax revenue from the very wealthy

multidimensional affluence theory and applications to germany and the us this article suggests multidimensional affluence measures for the top of the distribution in contrast to commonly used top income shares they allow the analysis of the extent intensity and breadth of affluence in several dimensions within a common framework we illustrate this by analysing the role of income and wealth as dimensions of multidimensional well being in germany and the us in 2007 as well as for the us over the period 1989 2007 we find distinct country differences with the country ranking depending on the measure while in germany wealth predominantly contributes to the intensity of affluence income is more important in the us

the rise and decline of general laws of capitalism economists have long been drawn to the ambitious quest of discovering the general laws of capitalism david ricardo for example predicted that capital accumulation would terminate in economic stagnation and inequality as a greater and greater share of national income accrued to landowners karl marx followed him by forecasting the inevitable immiseration of the proletariat thomas piketty s 2014 tome capital in the twenty first century emulates marx in his title his style of exposition and his critique of the capitalist system piketty is after general laws that will demystify our modern economy and elucidate the inherent problems of the system and point to solutions but the quest for general laws of capitalism is misguided because it ignores the key forces shaping how an economy functions the endogenous evolution of technology and of the institutions and the political equilibrium that influence not only technology but also how markets function and how the gains from various different economic arrangements are distributed despite his erudition ambition and creativity marx was led astray because of his disregard of these forces the same is true of piketty s sweeping account of inequality in capitalist economies in the next section we review marx s conceptualization of capitalism and some of his general laws we then turn to piketty s approach to capitalism and his general laws we will point to various problems in piketty s interpretation of the economic relationships underpinning inequality but the most important shortcoming is that

the retirement wealth of the baby boom generation abstract the paper compares the well being of the baby boom generation ages 40 55 in 2001 with the same age group in 1983 i find little evidence that their relative position deteriorated over the period by some indicators this generation has seen an improvement in terms of income the 40 55 age group was at about the same relative position in 2001 as in 1983 in terms of conventional wealth there was some slippage over the period in terms of mean augmented wealth net worth plus pension and social security wealth their relative position improved somewhat but in terms of median augmented wealth there was again some slippage

cohort size and the earnings growth of young workers this study used data from the 1968 75 current population surveys cps and the national longitudinal survey of young men nls to examine the effect of cohort size on earnings profiles in the us the elasticity of earnings growth with respect to cohort size was negative in each of the regressions analyzed indicating flatter earnings profiles and slower earnings growth for large cohorts a larger proportion of workers in large cohorts appear to choose occupations with less training content and flatter earnings profiles than workers in small cohorts in addition workers in large cohorts may find it advantageous to reduce their investments in training the negative effect of cohort size generally carried over to other schooling and gender groups only for the 2 lowest male schooling groups in the cps samples were the cohort size elasticities positive the cohort size elasticity displayed a larger negative effect for college graduates than for high school graduates or those with some college education the predicted earnings growth of college graduates is 11 6 less than that of high school graduates using the male cps parameter estimates 25 3 less with the female cps estimates and 6 less with the nls estimates these estimates are consistent with freemans finding that the longitudinal earnings profiles of college graduates have flattened relative to those of high school graduates in recent years since the initial earnings depression caused by cohort size widens with age as larger cohorts move along flatter earnings profiles the baby boom cohorts earnings levels may remain depressed throughout their careers on the other hand the smaller cohorts entering the labor market during the 1980s are likely to experience more favorable labor market conditions and faster earnings growth

how should capital be taxed this survey discusses how capital should be taxed in advanced economies we review the theoretical optimal tax literature survey empirical studies on the distribution of capital and the distortion

taxing across borders tracking personal wealth and corporate profits globalization is making it increasingly easy for corporations to shift profits to low tax countries modern technology has also made it simpler for wealthy individuals to move funds to undeclared bank accounts in offshore tax havens both issues have featured prominently in the news and global economic debates since the financial crisis but the arguments tend to be based on relatively little empirical evidence measuring the costs of tax havens to foreign governments is fraught with difficulties however balance of payments data and corporate filings show that us companies are shifting profits to bermuda luxembourg and similar countries on a large and growing scale about 20 percent of all us corporate profits are now booked in such havens a tenfold increase since the 1980s this profit shifting is typically done within the letter of the law and thus would be best described as tax avoidance rather than fraud i attempt to quantify its cost for government coffers by taking a fresh look at the most recent macroeconomic evidence and combining it in a systematic manner over the last 15 years the effective corporate tax rate of us companies has declined from 30 to 20 percent and about two thirds of this decline can be attributed to increased profit shifting to low tax jurisdictions wealthy individuals too use tax havens sometimes legally to benefit from banking services not available in their home country and sometimes illegally to evade taxes a number of changes have sought with some success to curb that form of tax evasion over the last years yet the available evidence from switzerland and

the missing wealth of nations are europe and the u s net debtors or net creditors this paper shows that official statistics substantially underestimate the net foreign asset positions of rich countries because they fail to capture most of the assets held by households in offshore tax havens drawing on systematic anomalies in portfolio investment positions and a unique swiss dataset i find that 8 of the global financial wealth of households is held in tax havens 6 of which goes unrecorded on the basis of plausible assumptions accounting for unrecorded assets turns the eurozone officially the world s second largest net debtor into a net creditor it also reduces the u s net debt significantly the results shed new light on global imbalances and challenge the widespread view that after a decade of poor to rich capital flows external assets are now in poor countries and debts in rich countries i provide concrete proposals to improve international investment statistics

teaching tools what s wrong here what s wrong here i introduction in the interest of enhancing the economic way of thinking many professors encourage students to read the wall street journal or other business periodicals a passive role while others following kelly 1983 use business periodicals in a more specific way in both instances the objective is to inspire students to correctly apply basic economic principles to real world problems in order to make economics relevant and interesting and to increase the retention level of a conventional one year economics course research by saunders 1980 pp 10 12 supports the importance of regular reading of business periodicals for achieving the goals the passive method of using business periodicals handing out wall street journal or business week sign up sheets and occasionally making periodic references to specific articles is time efficient for the busy professor but can be counterproductive unless the professor takes time to alert students to possible errors in economic reasoning that occur more frequently than is desirable in many business articles particularly articles applying supply and demand analysis most students will make the assumption that the economic analysis reported in the press is correct in those instances where journalists or experts apply improper economic reasoning in their reporting the article may serve the undesired outcome of reinforcing similar errors in thinking by students reading the article this confusion is further compounded when in the same article errors are reported in one segment while other arguments correctly apply economic concepts the purpose of this article is to aid professors in using business periodicals in principles courses by presenting examples of three errors in applying supply and demand analysis that are frequently made both by students and authors of business articles incorrect use of supply and demand analysis as evidenced in journalistic reports has several implications that can have adverse affects on students of professors who passively use business periodicals in introductory economics courses first the student who has been careful to learn the proper terminology and logic will feel uncomfortable and begin to question their own understanding when reading from someone professional who has applied the concept incorrectly second the student who at the time of reading does not fully appreciate the principle but is attempting to apply it will unfortunately learn from the incorrect presentation and thus the article will have a negative effect on the original teaching objective finally if the error made by the author is one made frequently by students it will become harder for the student to correctly learn economic principles since the student s erroneous reasoning has been verified by the journalist or the expert while it would be impossible for a professor to monitor even the wall street journal for all cases of misreporting during a semester the professor can make the students more sophisticated readers and hopefully avoid some of the above problems by presenting examples of typical errors of reasoning students may encounter in their outside reading the professor can maintain a file of articles that have come to his her attention or use available supplements that contain examples of journalistic errors applying economic reason some brief examples of typical errors that we have recently used effectively in our classes follow ii examples the first typical error involves the failure to carefully distinguish between changes in quantity demanded quantity supplied and changes in demand supply principles of economics texts carefully distinguish between changes in quantity demanded and changes in demand the terminology when consistently applied allows a reader to easily determine whether a change in buyer behavior has resulted from a change in product price or from a change in a non price determinant of demand

teaching tools on journalists use of macroeconomic concepts teaching tools on journalists use of macroeconomic concepts five macroeconomic concepts are presented which are prominent in the business sections of newspapers but which are not given equivalent prominence in macroeconomic textbooks these are the discouraged worker phenomenon the use of inventories in forecasting the effect of changes in the money supply on the bond market and the effects of inflation and nominal interest rates in the foreign exchange market these concepts are presented via news clips illustrating the way they typically appear in the press instructors are urged to place extra emphasis on these concepts i introduction it has become common for economics textbooks and instructors to use newspaper clippings to illustrate the application of economic concepts to the real world in addition to several readings books of newspaper articles a modest journal literature has appeared on this topic kelley 1983 advocates having students make up their own economics newspaper by cutting and pasting from regular news sources wood 1985 discusses many facets of the connection between news coverage of economic events and economic education drawing on his experience as a former reporter grunin and lindauer 1986 describe a course in economic journalism boynton and deissenberg 1987 extract a macroeconomic model implicit in newspaper commentary and cochran and brown 1989 warn instructors to be alert to journalists errors for example this literature tries in a variety of ways to address a common complaint expressed cogently by fels 1970 41 we neither try nor succeed in training students to use economic principles to evaluate critically what they read in the popular press this paper extends this literature in a new direction one of the many good reasons for supplementing economic instruction with newspaper clippings is to ensure that students can interpret and evaluate newspaper commentary on economic issues it is therefore important that economic concepts prominent in news articles be given adequate stress by instructors and in a way which illustrates how these concepts are used in newspapers in this paper i note five applications of macroeconomic concepts which play prominent roles in the financial pages of newspapers primarily because of their practical implications for the business world but which are not given an equally prominent treatment by textbooks since so many of our students will find themselves in the business world after graduation and so many more will retain contact with macroeconomics solely through newspaper commentary these five concepts seem worthy of extra emphasis by instructors a second point i wish to stress is that it is not enough to provide this extra emphasis within the context of the traditional textbook development of these macroeconomic concepts the traditional presentation must be supplemented with concrete examples illustrating how they are used in newspaper commentary with particular reference to their practical implications it is not unusual for journalists to write in a cryptic metaphor laden style that can disguise the macroeconomic concept being exploited and unlike textbooks explanations are seldom offered for this reason i present these five concepts accompanied by one or two sentence newspaper clips 1 illustrating the way they typically appear in the press most of the macroeconomic concepts playing prominent roles in newspaper commentary such as the multiplier monetary policy and the phillips curve play equally prominent roles in macroeconomics textbooks the five macroeconomic concepts discussed below were singled out because their textbook treatments are not commensurate with their importance in news reports and do not stress the potential roles these concepts can play in the interpretation of business world events

on the long run evolution of inheritance france 1820 2050 this paper attempts to document and account for the long run evolution of inheritance we find that in a country like france the annual flow of inheritance was about 20 25 of national income between 1820 and 1910 down to less than 5 in 1950 and back up to about 15 by 2010 a simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation growth and inheritance can fully account for the observed u shaped pattern and levels using this model we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20 25 of national income by 2050 this corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100 our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate say r 4 5 vs g 1 2 which was the case in the 19th century and early 20th century and is likely to happen again in the 21st century then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality contrarily to a widely spread view modern economic growth did not kill inheritance

the equalizing of wealth in britain since the second world war the article examines long run trends in the distribution of wealth it shows that in the period from the late 1930s to the late 1970s there was an equalizing of the distribution on a striking and unprecedented scale but that this was not subsequently sustained for marketable net wealth the share of the top 1 percent has fallen to only one fifth ofthe total in the late 1970s compared to over half in the late 1930s and two thirds before 1914 this had not simply been transferred to the next wealth groups the shares owned by the top 5 and 10 percent have also fallen sharply the downward trend is attributed to four factors the direct and indirect effects of death duties social changes in the patterns of wealth holding and inheritance the post war accumulation of popular wealth notably houses and changes in the relative price of assets copyright 1996 by oxford university press

estimating the effectiveness and benefits of alcohol treatment programmes for use in economic evaluations a binary probit model based on random utility theory is employed to obtain the implicit determinants of alcohol treatment effectiveness revealed by decisions made by programme evaluators of behavioural changes by patients a scale of equivalences for the behavioural variables is constructed which uses reductions in alcohol drinking as the unit of account because one of the behavioural variables was the change in income from treatment expressed in dollars the trade offs contained in the scale of equivalences can be translated into monetary terms using the human capital approach the method is applied to a sample of 1689 observations from the national alcoholism program information system napis tapes for 1977 81

unequal english wealth since 1670 new data on probated wealth landownership debts and occupations extend our view of the distribution of english wealth back from 1911 to 1670 there were widening gaps in mean wealth between the top landed plus merchant classes and the middle classes across the industrial revolution century size distributions for individual assets also widened so did those for income or total wealth including human but nonhuman net worth did not become more unequal because of important shifts in the land share all inequality measures before 1914 exceeded all those since 1950 the estimates illuminate classical theories of distribution

a head to head comparison of augmented wealth in germany and the united states we examine the composition of augmented household wealth i e the sum of net worth and pension wealth in the united states and germany pension wealth makes up a considerable portion of household wealth of about 48 percent in the united states and 61 percent in germany when pension wealth is included in household wealth the gini coefficient falls from 0 889 to 0 700 in the united states and from 0 755 to 0 508 in germany if the wealth shares in germany were the same as in the united states this would lead to a 12 6 percent increase in the gini coefficient in the augmented wealth distribution in germany

nordic exceptionalism social democratic egalitarianism in world historic perspective abstract in what respect if any are the nordic economies exceptionally egalitarian when viewed from a world historical perspective our answer is based on archaeological historical and ethnographic as well as contemporary evidence over the past three thousand years the countries exemplifying the nordic model are not exceptionally equal in the ownership of material wealth moreover the advent of social democracy in the nordic nations did not result in a more equal distribution of years of schooling but intergenerational economic and social mobility appears to be exceptional in the nordic nations and by most measures inequalities in living standards in the nordic economies are less than in other advanced economies the closest nordic analogy in our data set is to the egalitarian distribution of well being and limited intergenerational transmission of wealth found in some horticultural and especially forager economies

gender differences in pensions the causes of gender differences in pensions are examined for retirees and employees using the 1982 newly entitled beneficiary survey and the 1979 and 1988 may current population surveys for both retirees and the employed population much of the gender gap in coverage is accounted for by gender differences in labor market characteristics while children and marriage have a negative effect on female coverage among retirees even after controlling for labor market characteristics the negative effect is not observed among more recent groups of female employees finally recent convergence of male and female labor market characteristics contributed to a decline in the coverage gap during the 1980s

inheritance and wealth inequality evidence from population registers we use new population wide register data on inheritances and wealth in sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality we find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequality e g the gini coefficient falls by 5 10 percent but that absolute dispersion increases examining different parts of the wealth distribution we find that the top decile s wealth share decreases substantially whereas the wealth share of the bottom half increases from a negative to a positive share in essence wealthier heirs inherit larger amounts but less wealthy heirs inherit more relative to their pre inheritance wealth we also find that post inheritance behavioral adjustments mitigate the equalizing effect of inheritances because less wealthy heirs consume larger shares of their inheritances moreover we find that the swedish inheritance tax reduced the equalizing inheritance effect but that the redistribution of tax revenues could reverse this result finally we show that inheritances increase wealth mobility

delinquency schooling and work time allocation decision of youth this paper examines the possible factors that affect the time allocation decision of youth between delinquency schooling and work based on a joint decision model evidence from montreal shows that influences from different social institutions such as family church school peers and the workplace are important determinants of how young people decide to spend their time on various activities the findings provided here take into account the joint decision nature of the problem and therefore provide more precise estimates than those of the existing literature

the evolution of top incomes in an egalitarian society sweden 1903 2004 this study presents new homogenous series of top income shares in sweden over the period 1903 2004 we find that starting from levels of inequality approximately equal to those in other western countries at the time the income share of the swedish top decile drops sharply over the first eighty years of the twentieth century most of the decrease takes place before the expansion of the welfare state and by 1950 swedish top income shares were already lower than in other countries the fall is almost entirely due to a dramatic drop in the top percentile explained mostly by decreases in capital income while the lower half of the top decile consisting mainly of wage earners experiences virtually no change over this period in the past decades top income shares evolve very differently depending on whether capital gains are included or not when included sweden s experience resembles that in the u s and the u k with sharp increases in top incomes excluding capital gains sweden looks more like the continental european countries where top income shares have remained relatively constant a possible interpretation of our results is that sweden over the past 20 years has become a country where it is more important to make the right financial investments than to earn a lot to become rich

wealth concentration in a developing economy paris and france 1807 1994 using large samples of estate tax returns we construct new series on wealth concentration in paris and france from 1807 to 1994 inequality increased until 1914 because industrial and financial estates grew dramatically then adverse shocks rather than a kuznets type process led to a massive decline in inequality the very high wealth concentration prior to 1914 benefited retired individuals living off capital income rentiers rather than entrepreneurs the very rich were in their seventies and eighties whereas they had been in their fifties a half century earlier and would be so again after world war ii our results shed new light on ongoing debates about wealth inequality and growth

democracy war and wealth lessons from two centuries of inheritance taxation in this article we use an original data set to provide the first empirical analysis of the political economy of inherited wealth taxation that covers a significant number of countries and a long time frame 1816 2000 our goal is to understand why if inheritance taxes are often very old taxes the implementation of inheritance tax rates significant enough to affect wealth inequality is a much more recent phenomenon we hypothesize alternatively that significant taxation of inherited wealth depended on 1 the extension of the suffrage and 2 political conditions created by mass mobilization for war using a difference in differences framework for identification we find little evidence for the suffrage hypothesis but very strong evidence for the mass mobilization hypothesis our study has implications for understanding the evolution of wealth inequality and the political conditions under which countries are likely to implement policies that significantly redistribute wealth and income

the value of time and the effect of fines on child car safety seat usage we report the results of a survey on child car safety seat usage and test the hypothesis that the opportunity cost of time is a significant determinant of proper seat use we find that parents with high wage rates are less likely to properly use a car seat we predict that a fine of 1775 along with a certainty of being apprehended once in a four year period would be needed to induce 95 compliance with child car safety seat laws

participation in universal prevention programs we analyse family decisions to participate in community based universal substance abuse prevention programmes through the framework of expected utility theory family functioning which has been shown to be a good indicator of child risk for substance abuse provides a useful reference point for family decision making our results show that well functioning families with children at low risk for substance use should have the lowest incentive to participate but that high risk families may also opt out of prevention programmes for programmes that are most effective for high risk youth this could be a problem using data from the strengthening families programme sfp and the washington healthy youth survey hys we empirically test the implications of our model and find that at least for one measure of family functioning those families with children most likely to be at risk for substance use are opting out of the programme

women wealth and mobility using estate tax returns data we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the united states peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one half and then declined to one third we argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth with the share of women proxying for inher ited wealth if so wealth mobility decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter such an interpretation is consistent with technological change driving long term trends in mobility and inequality as well as the recent divergence between top wealth and top income shares documented elsewhere jel d31 j16 j62 033 the extent of and changes in intergenerational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but are hard to measure in this paper we argue that the share of women among the wealthiest americans can be used as a proxy for the importance of inherited rela tive to self made wealth this approach assumes that women tend to inherit rather than make great fortunes if so a higher share of women among the wealthy would reflect a rise in inherited wealth at the top and thus lower wealth mobility conversely higher wealth mobility where self made wealth replaces inherited wealth would result in more men at the top of the wealth distribution judged by this proxy and corroborated by various data sources wealth mobility decreased in the period 1925 1969 and increased thereafter such a pattern is consistent with an important role for technological change in shaping the wealth distribution and can provide an explanation for why wealth concentra tion has remained stable despite increasing income concentration in the last three decades over the past century the share of women among the very wealthy followed an inverse u pattern peaking in the late 1960s according to estate tax returns in 1925 one quarter of the wealthiest 0 01 percent were women this fraction rose rapidly through world war ii wwii and then more slowly to peak in 1969 when women neared parity with men since then the decline has been marked by 2000 women s share had fallen to one third its prewar level while the rise was evident among all wealth groups in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution the decline was confined to the very top figure ia graphs the share of women for four different groups in the top 1 percent among decedents by year figure ib does the same for the living population with the help of estate multipliers a method that treats death as a random sampling device and uses mortality rates by age and gender to infer the distribution of wealth among the living as described in the data appendix while the rise in the share of women among the wealthy until the 1960s could reflect improve ments in women s economic status labor market gains work against the recent decline for instance since the 1970s the share of women among top earners top 0 1 percent has risen by

older or wealthier the impact of age adjustment on wealth inequality differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality however as this finding relies on cross sectional data a concern is that older is confused with wealthier we propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross sections which eliminates wealth inequality due to age yet preserves inequality arising from other factors using a new cross country comparable database we examine the impact of age adjustments on wealth inequality across countries and over time we find that the most widely used method yields a substantially different picture of age adjusted wealth inequality than our method 2011 the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

intergenerational wealth mobility and the role of inheritance evidence from multiple generations this study estimates intergenerational correlations in mid life wealth across three generations and a young fourth generation and examines how much of the parent child association that can be explained by inheritances using a swedish data set we find parent child rank correlations of 0 3 0 4 and grandparents grandchild rank correlations of 0 1 0 2 conditional on parents wealth grandparents wealth is weakly positively associated with grandchild s wealth and the parent child correlation is basically unchanged if we control for grandparents wealth bequests and gifts strikingly account for at least 50 per cent of the parent child wealth correlation while earnings and education are only able to explain 25 per cent

women in top incomes evidence from sweden 1971 2017 abstract using yearly register data on the full population of sweden we study gender differences in top incomes down to the top 0 01 percentile group over the period 1971 2017 we find that while women are still a minority of the top decile and typically make up a smaller share the higher up in the distribution we move their presence has steadily increased in all top groups over the past half century at the beginning of the period top income women relied more on capital incomes but the rise in the share of top women is not due to the growing importance of capital instead women have increased their presence in the top by gains in the top of labour incomes while top income men have captured most of the growth in capital incomes studying gender differences in observable characteristics we find small gender differences in some respects convergence in others but also some important remaining differences overall our results suggest that many findings in the top income literature have a clear gender component and that understanding gender equality in the top of the distribution requires studying not only earnings and labour market outcomes but also incomes from other sources as well as family circumstances

human development and alcohol abuse in adolescence the aim of this article is to analyse the development of human capital in adolescents as represented by their state of health and educational attainment when this capital is affected by the abusive consumption of alcohol measured by grams of ethanol to that end we adopt a theoretical framework derived from the model of rational addiction the model of health demand and the model of schooling demand which is then estimated by using data drawn from the spanish national survey on drug use in the school population 1996 1998 2000 results confirm that higher alcohol consumption leads to worse health states and lower academic efficiency among adolescents which suggests the need to implement effective policies aimed at reducing alcohol abuse among this population group

teaching tools teaching methods in undergraduate economics i introduction in 1970 nobel laureate george stigler argued that economics belongs in everyone s education once we have learned how to teach it but because the logic of economics is not easy to learn or teach he concluded that economics is not yet ready to be made a part of the basic curriculum of all educated men p 80 we now have new models for teaching economics in fact as in other areas of economics we have competing models with new approaches being offered to supplement extensively if not replace entirely the lecture pedagogy used nearly exclusively by economists at the time stigler s comments were published yet in major commission and committee reports and daily conversations held in faculty lounges around the world alternatives to the lecture approach in which the teacher often serves as a preacher and students as passive receptacles into which great thoughts and wisdom are poured still appear to be either unknown or tacitly dismissed as unworkable in this journal for example mccloskey 1992 tells of an exchange between george stigler and milton friedman friedman argued that while individuals pursue their self interest they are often ignorant and require education to see that something they thought was in their personal or national interest was not e g tariffs and quotas stigler called friedman a preacher he argued that people find their own self interest with or without education and that no amount of preaching or lecturing about economics would change that self interest in the report of the commission on graduate education in economics by krueger et al 1991 considerable attention was given to bringing real world issues into the classroom but the commission s assumed instructional mode was still the lecture it is our impression that most ph d programs devote little or no attention to teaching or encouraging the development of expository skills we suspect the lack of emphasis on communication in most ph d programs reflects partly the scarcity of teaching time partly instructors lack of confidence in their ability to teach communications skills and partly a judgment that the appropriate style of professional communication is something students can figure out for themselves by watching their teachers p 1049 the report of the committee on college faculty by kasper et al 1991 representing the nation s premiere liberal arts colleges emphasized the need for breadth in content coverage in economists graduate training but did not even mention the need for breadth in instructional methods or training in those areas despite these intentional or unintentional slights in literature from the past twenty five years we found that many economists have spent a great deal of time developing and applying new teaching methods to actively engage students in the learning process in what follows we summarize those alternative approaches to make it easier for others to consider and access these articles on innovative instructional methods in economics ii classroom games simulations and laboratories although edward chamberlin and others working in the area of imperfect competition were developing artificial markets in the classroom as early as the 1940s joseph and saunders 1970 were perhaps the first economists to publish an extensive account on how to use such games to teach basic economic concepts the approach soon proved to be quite popular at least with the developers of these activities the national council on economic education then known as the joint council on economic education published the first edition of its guide to games and simulations for teaching economics in 1971 written by lewis and wentworth with references to some ninety different activities and publications in recent years commercially published games and simulations in economics have continued to appear often featuring mainframe econometric models or microcomputer programs written specifically as a classroom simulation

intergenerational top income mobility in sweden capitalist dynasties in the land of equal opportunity this paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions using a large dataset of matched father son pairs in sweden we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong at the top more so for income than for earnings at the extreme top top 0 1 income transmission is remarkable with an intergenerational elasticity of approximately 0 9 we also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that iq non cognitive skills and education of the sons are all unlikely channels in explaining the strong transmission within the top percentile increases in the income of the fathers if they are related at all are negatively associated with these variables wealth on the other hand has a significantly positive association our results suggest that sweden known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general is a society in which transmission remains strong at the very top of the distribution and wealth is the most likely channel