Intended for

Researchers, economists, and policy practitioners.

Prerequisites

Participants should be comfortable with Master’s level courses in macroeconomics and econometrics.

Overview

This course studies the growing body of empirical research that draws new insights from big data into economic inequality and micro risks. We will cover both technical tools and substantive economic findings in this area. In particular, we will discuss different types of inequality (in annual versus lifetime incomes; at the top versus elsewhere; between versus within: firms, regions, genders, etc.; inequality in wealth, health, and others), why each type of inequality matters, what we know about them, and how they have changed over time. Similarly, we will discuss different types of micro risks (facing households, workers, or firms), how they vary across the population, the non-Gaussian nature of these risks, and how these risks vary over the business cycle and over longer horizons. We will discuss the new insights into these questions provided by research from big data. Many of the substantive empirical conclusions that we will cover in this course have emerged from the analyses of newly available big data sets based on administrative records, and in many cases, these conclusions are very different from the earlier conclusions reached with smaller, survey-based data sets.

Topics

Introduction and trends in income risk
Idiosyncratic risks over the life cycle and the business cycle
Income inequality: Trends over time
Lifetime incomes: New facts and trends over time
Wealth inequality: Facts and Models

Fatih Guvenen is the Curtis L. Carlson Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Minnesota Economics Big Data Institute (MEBDI). He also serves as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Fatih received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Turkey and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in economics from Carnegie Mellon University. He has held visiting or full-time academic positions at various institutions, including the University of Rochester, NYU Stern School of Business, Yale University, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Fatih’s research focuses on various dimensions of economic inequality and how these interact with the macroeconomy and government policies. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies, among others, and have been covered in the media (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Fortune, among others). His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Retirement Research Consortium, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other organizations.