Inequality Research Initiative

Inequality is at the center of many socioeconomic questions debated by academics, policy makers, and the public today. It is also one of the core focus areas of MEBDI and its network of affiliated researchers.

For example, the GRID Project — a joint initiative between MEBDI/UMN, Princeton, and Stanford — aims to make a wide range of statistics on income inequality in 13 countries freely available to researchers and the broader public. Notably, the available statistics include not only measures of short-run (annual) income inequality, but also measures of inequality in long-run income status, based on multi-year averages of individual incomes.

In addition, MEBDI’s Inequality Research Initiative brings together a network of leading scholars on inequality research from the University of Minnesota’s Economics Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ Research Department. Their research sheds important light on the causes and consequences of disparities across individuals, including inequalities in income, wealth, health, and educational attainment, among others.