Inequalities

Author: Brendan Saloner

  • Conference Announcement: Complex Systems, Health Disparities & Population Health: Building Bridges

    Conference on Complex Systems, Health Disparities & Population Health: Building Bridges February 24-25, 2014 Natcher Conference Center NIH Campus, Bethesda, MD Presented by the University of Michigan Network on Inequality, Complexity and Health Improving population health and eliminating health disparities is a critical task, yet our efforts are stymied by the complexity of the task, involving…

  • The Immense Benefit of Applying to One More College – A Natural Experiment

    A college degree is more than a wall ornament – it represents immense financial benefits for graduates. These rewards have become even more apparent during the long financial downturn, which have seen widening wage and employment gaps between college graduates and those with only a high school degree. Studies also illustrate that getting students to…

  • Marriage and Parental Investment in Children

    Marriage ain’t what it used to be. Consider that: In 1950, almost half of all women were married by age 20 and for men the age was 23. By 2010, the median age of first marriage had increased to about 24 for women and 27 for men. More people are opting out of marriage. In…

  • Income Mobility and Geography: Important New Research

    Some new research by Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez, Nathaniel Hendren, and Patrick Kline finds that the likelihood of poor children moving up the income ladder in early adulthood varies dramatically by metro area in the United States. In places like Salt Lake City, Utah or Bakersfield, California, a child born in the bottom quintile has…

  • U.S. Health Disadvantage is Not Inevitable

    Two major research studies in the last year compare health indicators in the United States with other major upper-income countries. Both exhaustively review government statistics and published articles. The first study, from the Institute of Medicine, draws on a panel of luminary demographers and epidemiologists to explore the causes of U.S. health disadvantage (editors Laudan…

  • The Asian American Paradox: “Model Minorities” and Outsiders

    Asian Americans are among the fastest growing demographics in the United States, yet they receive little attention in the study of racial inequality. This is especially surprising because Asian Americans occupy a paradoxical position in American society — simultaneously successful and marginal. On average, Asian American educational attainment, income, and wealth is equal to, or…

  • Has Income Inequality Really Ballooned Since the 1970s?

    One of the most influential lines of research on income inequality come from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s study of income tax records in the United States and elsewhere. Summarizing this work in Slate, Timothy Noah states: “The share of national income going to the top 1 percent (the Rich) more than doubled during the…

  • Learning About Inequality Increases Concern, But Not Necessarily Support for Redistribution

    A puzzle: income inequality between the top 1% and the rest has surged in the last few years, yet support for redistribution among the general public has actually declined (see figure below). Do people not care about inequality, or do they not know the facts? To test this hypothesis, Ilyana Kuziemko recently conducted an online…

  • Social Factors and the Evaluation of Mental Disorders

    The American Psychiatric Association is set to release the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) this month. These new guidelines will have a profound effect on how clinicians diagnose mental disorders, how health insurers reimburse for treatment, how drug makers market their products, and how the government determines benefits…

  • Immigration reform without public benefits

    Any viable immigration reform proposal in the United States senate has to pass through Florida Republican Marcio Rubio. That’s why it was big news when Rubio announced his support for a bipartisan plan on the Sunday news shows, stressing that the new program would establish a pathway to citizenship but offers very little to immigrants…