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Vozpopuli (Spain):
Tres grandes falacias sobre desigualdad/Three great fallacies about inequality

12 March 2018

That a counter-cyclical monetary policy of low interest rates can raise the yields of certain financial assets, whose property tends to be biased towards families with higher assets and this encourage inequality, is an argument that I believe may be valid. There is some evidence of this, so we could include this explanation in the long list of possible candidates. But there are other explanations that can also lead us to find that these same policies can have an opposite effect on inequality. For example, because they improve access to credit, because they reduce unemployment, because they reduce financial costs to those who have a net debit position, and so on. In addition, and assuming that the effect of monetary policies can be very ambiguous, this would be one of many other explanations that it is not reasonable to discard, when these also have much greater empirical relevance. I think Daron Acemoglu, David Author, Kevin M. Murphy, David Card, John E. DiNardo, Brooks Pierce, Stephen Machin, J. van Reenen, David Dorn, Nicole Fortin, Thomas Lemieux, Matthias Cortés, Lawrence Katz, Goldin, Eli Berman, John Bound, Enmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson, Nicholas Bloom, Thomas Phillipon, Branko Milanovic, Stefanie Stantcheva, Per Krusell, Oded Galor, Omer Moav, Tony Smith, Gustavo Ventura, Martin Gervais, Facundo Alvaredo, Peter Gottschalk, Sergio Firpo, Dirk Krueger, Fabrizio Perri, Amin Sufi, Kurt Minam, Greg Kaplan, Benjamín Moll, Makoto Nakajima, Antonia Díaz, Javier Díaz Giménez, Josep Pijoan, Laura Hospido, Jorge Onrubia, Olimpia Bover, Lee E. Ohanian, José- Víctor Ríos-Rull, Giovanni L. Violantel, Luis Ayala, Nacho González, Clara Martínez-Toledano, Miguel Artola or Enrico Moretti, among others, are not going to be, all wrong, right?

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