Wednesday, April 28, 2021
12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.
via Zoom
This was the 12th webinar of the “Facing Inequality” series, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe – especially those revealed by the current COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, within the academy and without, to present work and discuss ideas that can facilitate new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
The “Facing Inequality” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.
In this webinar, Neil Cummins discussed his current research. Using individual level records of all wealth-at-death in England, 1892-1992, together with new estimates of the wealth-specific rate-of-return on wealth, he estimates a plausible minimum level of the amount of inherited wealth that is hidden. Elites conceal around 20% of their inheritance. Among dynasties, this hidden wealth, independent of declared wealth, predicts appearance in the Offshore Leaks Database of 2013-6, house values in 1999, and Oxbridge attendance, 1990-2016. Accounting for hidden wealth eliminates at least 40% of the observed decline of the top 10% wealth-share over the past century. Cummins finds 8,549 dynasties that are hiding £7.7 Billion.
Marina Gindelsky (Bureau of Economic Analysis) and Jonathan Rothbaum (U.S. Census Bureau) served as discussants. IIEP Co-Director James Foster will moderate.
About the speaker:
Neil Cummins is an Associate Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics, where he also received his PhD in 2009. His research themes are “life, love and death”; Neil uses Historical Big Data to answer fundamental questions about economics, demography and history. Previously he has published papers on the decline of fertility in Europe, the effects of bubonic plague in London, the dynamics of the Malthusian economy, in France, and the lifespans of European Elites since the 9th century. Together with Greg Clark, he has documented the glacial rate of social mobility over the past 1,000 years in Britain. Currently he is using the individual information of hundreds of millions of English, 1838 to today, to describe and characterise wealth inequality, the hidden wealth of the English elite, assortment in the marriage market, and ethnic assimilation in England. This research will add new micro-evidence, on a population scale, for the historical development of, and the causal forces creating, inequality in contemporary Britain. His methods combine economic logic and historical sources with big data analytics. His research papers are available at neilcummins.com.
About the discussants:
Marina Gindelsky is a Research Economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Office of the Chief Economist. Her current research focuses on income distributions, including the newly launched Distribution of Personal Income, which distributes U.S. macro national accounts totals to households, and participation in the OECD Expert Group on Disparities in a National Accounts Framework. She has a wide range of research interests in labor, urban and development economics, and a diverse set of ongoing and published projects including forecasting and measuring multidimensional inequality, analyzing historical urban growth in developing countries, assessing immigrant assimilation outcomes, and estimating housing using Zillow data. Before joining the BEA, she consulted at the World Bank and completed a Masters in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Economics from GW.
Jonathan Rothbaum is a research economist in the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. He works on the integration of administrative data into the production of income, resource, and wellbeing statistics. His research has focused on nonresponse, measurement error, and data quality in income surveys and on using surveys to study intergenerational mobility in the United States. Prior to joining the Census Bureau in 2013, Rothbaum received his doctorate in economics from George Washington University.
About the moderator:
James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autonoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).
