Finance & Inequality

Newspaper Article Causes of Global Financial Crisis III: The New Millenium Explaining the relationship between Finance and Inequality.

Newspaper Article: The Vacuum Cleaner Effect: Wealth accumulates and instead of trickling down, it is sucked up to the top

MORE documentation of current and increasing inequality worldwide and in US

See also, the Price of Inequality by Joseph Stiglitz.

Striking it richer: the evolution of top incomes in the United States 120

Emmanuel Saez download pdf

ATIYAB SULTAN: Investigating the Relationship between Financial Development and Inequality:

An Empirical Analysis, M.Phil. Thesis:

Abstract. This paper studies the relationship between financial development and inequality using a two-tiered approach. In the first stage, new measures of financial access and usage are generated, and it is seen that increased access to the formal financial sector is associated with reduced inequality across countries. In the next stage, a longitudinal analysis is carried out using data from Singapore 1964-2002. Employing the Pesaran, Shin and Smith technique for estimating Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag models, a time-series analysis is conducted to uncover the long-run relationship between financial intermediation and inequality. The results support theories of the „intensive margin‟ which suggest that financial development benefits rich and privileged groups in society disproportionately due to their greater access to financial resources and incentives during and after a period of financial reform.

Banking Finance and Income Inequality:

Graham Hodgson, October 2013

graham@positivemoney.org

ABSTRACT: Within society, a moderate degree of inequality is considered to provide a stimulus to economic progress

and general prosperity. When taken to extremes, however, the forces of envy and fear that it

harnesses can undermine the system of norms and sanctions regulating social stability. !is study

presents a framework mechanism for understanding how two potentially self-reinforcing circuits of

money and wealth on the one hand and debt and hardship on the other are linked, through behaviour

motivated by envy and the desire to emulate peers, to exacerbate inequality, and how the resulting

anxiety and fear feeds through to policy choices which can mitigate or magnify the problem. Key

interactions within the mechanism are identi"ed as is the nature of the causative connection between

credit creation and asset prices and the importance of social norms a#ecting remuneration and desired

levels of consumption. Discussion of the framework draws attention to the importance of moral

authority and institutional design in securing stable social and economic development.