Substack

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Income inequality and bubbles

Mark Thoma, drawing from data collected by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, finds striking relationship between income concentration and development of bubbles. The concentration of incomes increased even as the dot com and then the housing bubbles got inflated, leading Prof Thoma to infer that it is more probable that income concentration caused bubbles.

Update 1
Justin Fox feels that "the rise in income inequality over the past 30 years has to a significant extent been the product of a series of asset-price bubbles".

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