Trends in Inequality: Sources and Policy

我们开发了宏观经济环境下的结构性家庭生命周期模型，以评估收入、财富、工作时间和消费不平等对福利的影响，并定量地将不平等趋势分解为各种来源。然后，我们使用这些模型来评估财政和货币政策对不平等的影响，并描述福利改善政策的特征。我们的方法将考虑到家庭生命周期各个阶段的相互依赖关系，以及不平等、宏观经济和政策之间的三方互动。我们对数据的结构性解释将为预测未来不平等趋势和政策设计提供关键信息，从而为政策制定者提供重要信息。我们根据两个主要的主题，来源和政策来组织我们的项目，我们在两个工作包中描述了这两个主题。每个工作包包含几个相互构建的子项目（总共12个）。子项目强调生命周期的不同阶段，使用不同的数据集并分析不同的政策工具。在一个项目中联合起来有很大的方法优势，我们可以借鉴彼此的专业知识，利用各自的数据集，在对影响不平等的不同关键生命周期阶段和政策决策进行建模方面。我们将通过几个较小的内部研讨会、一个中等规模的国际会议、科学论文、政策简报和我们的联合网站，在内部和外部传达我们的研究结果。

We develop structural household life-cycle models in macroeconomic environments to evaluate the effects of inequality in income, wealth, hours worked and consumption on welfare, and to quantitatively decompose the trends in inequality into their various sources. We then use these models to evaluate the impact of fiscal and monetary policies on inequality and to characterize welfare improving policies. Our approach will account for the interdependencies of all stages of a household's life-cycle and the three-way interaction between inequality, the macroeconomy, and policy. Our structural interpretation of the data will provide key information for predicting future trends of inequalities and for the design of policy, thereby providing important information to policy makers. We organize our project according to two main overarching themes, sources and policies, which we describe in two work packages. Each work package contains several subprojects (12 in total) that build on each other. The subprojects emphasize different stages of the life-cycle, use different datasets and analyze different sets of policy instruments. Joining forces in one project has the substantial methodological advantage that we can borrow from each other's expertise with respective datasets and in modeling different crucial life cycle stages and policy decisions affecting inequality. We will communicate our findings internally and externally through several smaller internal workshops, a medium sized international conference, scientific papers, policy briefs, and our joint website.