🔗In this paper we construct a new database on human capital investment worldwide since 1800.
1⃣ World inequalities in HK investment are abysmal. If anything, they have increased.
2⃣ Substantial efforts at equalizing investment could play a key role in productivity convergence. Education spending per child in Sub-Saharan Africa was about 4% of European/North American levels in 1950. It is about 3% today.
South and South-East Asia have started to catch up but still invest less than 10% of European/North American levels.

👋New paper!
How do hours worked vary across countries, historically, and why?
We construct a new microdatabase covering 160 countries, including long time series in 86 countries, to revisit these questions. 👇

https://twitter.com/nberpubs/status/1966607853843571159

Our database builds from the incredible efforts made by the ILO and World Bank at compiling surveys from around the world. Combining their harmonized data with other sources, we build a new database covering hours worked in 2,490 surveys fielded in 160 countries.

Incredibly happy to see my paper forthcoming in @QJEHarvard! I quantify how much of worldwide growth and poverty reduction can be accounted for by education over 1980-2019. A quick summary 1/9 👇 There have been enormous improvements in educational attainment since 1980. For instance, the share of the world's adults with at least some secondary education rose from about 20% to 55%. 2/9

Global poverty is commonly measured by counting the number of people whose consumption falls below a given threshold.
This approach overlooks an enormous component of people’s economic well-being: public goods. 🧵 Existing measures of global poverty (e.g., World Bank) are based on household consumption = market value of all goods and services purchased by households.
These measures exclude public goods, since these goods are not bought on a market.
This has two implications.

How does redistribution vary over the course of development?
Has there been a convergence in tax-and-transfer systems?
We Matt Fisher-Post, we paint the first global picture of government redistribution since 1980.
5 stylized facts: 🧵
@voxeu @BaldwinRE
cepr.org/voxeu/columns/… 1/ Government redistribution always reduces inequality, but with large variations.

Excited to present my job market paper!
Exploiting a unique microdatabase, I estimate that education accounts for:
1⃣ 50% of global economic growth since 1980
2⃣ 70% of growth for the world’s poorest 20%
3⃣ 50% of global gender inequality reduction
🔗 amory-gethin.fr/files/pdf/Geth… The starting point is a new microdatabase representative of 95% of the world’s population, which I assemble by harmonizing surveys fielded in 150 countries around 2019. It provides comprehensive information on education, individual incomes, and other sociodemographics.

Hugely excited to announce the publication of our article in @QJEHarvard!🤩 This paper is the outcome of a massive data collection effort that we started with @cmtneztt and @PikettyLeMonde in 2017.
A few takeaways on the evolution of political divides in Western democracies 👇 1/ The disconnection of income & educational divides. In the 1950s, left-wing parties were supported by both low-income & lower-educated voters. There has been a striking reversal of educational divides, leading to a separation between a "Brahmin left" and a "Merchant right".

So happy to see our article forthcoming at AEJ: Applied 🥳 This was the very first paper I ever worked on, quite a journey since we started collecting data in 2017 with @thomas_blncht and @lucas_chancel!
Here are five facts that we uncover about income inequality in 🇪🇺 and 🇺🇸: 👇 1/ Income inequality has risen faster in Eastern Europe than in Western/Northern Europe, but in no European country have top incomes boomed quite as fast as in the US.

Can redistributive policies successfully foster inclusive growth in emerging economies?
With @aroopc82 and @Leo_Czajka, we shed new light on this question by studying the case of South Africa, one of the most unequal countries in the world.🧵👇
🔗tinyurl.com/y3p36hdf This 🧵 is based on our new working paper, "Can Redistribution Keep Up with Inequality? Evidence from South Africa, 1993-2019".
Part of a broader project on inequality in 🇿🇦, including wealth inequality (tinyurl.com/kxmv8w2w) and wealth taxation (tinyurl.com/xuzb5shm).