Despite a renewal of public and scholarly attention to inequality, little is known about the role of government taxes and transfers in shaping inequality across countries and over time. Based on a database on the distribution of taxes and transfers in 151 countries, this column uncovers a number of new results on the evolution of […]
Climate change is a global common, but its impact across the world is not common – it is very uneven. Mitigation of climate change also involves distributional issues since historic, current, and future emissions are highly unequally distributed across the globe. This creates conflict lines that are increasingly blocking progress under the Conference of the […]
Sharp increases in earnings and income inequality in the late 20th century generated heated policy debates and academic enquiry into the causes of distributional change. But most of these analyses provide snapshots of income distribution at a given point in time without considering the trajectories of individuals’ earnings over their lifecycle. This column discusses recent […]
Banks with substantial central bank reserves are earning income from their reserve holdings in the ECB’s recent rate hiking cycle. This column uses new data from AnaCredit, a credit register harmonised across the euro area, to show that the credit supply of banks with higher reserves reacts less strongly to interest rate hikes than that […]
Canada and Google have reached a deal to keep news stories in search results and for the internet giant to pay C$100 million ($73.6 million) annually to news publishers in the country, a Canadian official said on Wednesday. The deal resolves Alphabet-owned Google’s concerns over Canada’s online news law that seeks to make large internet companies […]
Financial technology firm SoFi Technologies is set to exit the cryptocurrency business and has given its customers the option to migrate to UK-based Blockchain.com, the companies said on Wednesday. The San Francisco-based company said it was ending its crypto services on Dec. 19, and starting Wednesday, new SoFi crypto accounts cannot be opened. The crypto industry […]
Microsoft will take a non-voting, observer position on OpenAI’s board, CEO Sam Altman said in his first official missive after taking back the reins of the company on Wednesday. The observer position means Microsoft’s representative can attend OpenAI’s board meetings and access confidential information, but it does not have voting rights on matters including electing […]
Imagine a massive industry expo with the drama of a dozen simultaneous political conferences, a few flashes of impassioned protest and the occasional crowd crush to glimpse a climate celebrity. Such is the scene at the annual COP conference, this year being held Nov. 30-Dec. 12 in the Emirati city of Dubai. Staged across a cavernous […]
The role of worker and job reallocation in an economy’s response to shocks and their impact on inequality is crucial, but less attention was paid to occupational reallocation. This column explores how occupational reallocation impacts job flows and wage disparities amidst technological and economic shifts using data from 1989 to 2019. The findings show a […]
Housing is a major component of energy consumption, yet residential emissions have typically received less policy attention than emissions from industry or transportation. This column combines the results of a household survey administered across a large sample of emerging markets with cross-country data on residential emissions. It shows how relatively low-cost, technologically straightforward improvements, such […]
