Elective Course - 4th Semester (Spring 2nd year) | Course ID: T226 | E-Class
According to the curriculum, students must choose three elective courses during the fourth semester

Διδάσκοντες

Nikos Stravelakis

Nicholas Theocharakis

Language of instruction

Greek

Course outline

• Introduction and Course Outline
• Historical Review: Inequality in Classical Political Economy
• Neoclassical Theory and Inequality (Pareto, Dalton, Pigou)
• The Harrod - Domar - Hicks Growth Models
• Convergence and speed of convergence - The Solow model
• Lucas' endogenous growth model and conditional convergence (Mankiw, Romer & Weil)
• Is there Convergence or Inequality between National Economies?
• Income and Wealth Inequality. From Kuznets to Atkinson to Piketty and Saez (2 lectures)
• Classical - Marxist Interpretation of Inequality
• The Modern Aspects of Inequality - Racial and Gender Inequality
• Inequality and Electoral Behaviour - The Literature on Inequality in Greece

Bibliography

• Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2015. “The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 3-28.
• Amin, Samir. 1973. “The End of a Debate”, United Nations. Economic Commission for Africa. African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) (1973-09). Dakar.
• Arrow, Kenneth J. 1998. "What Has Economics to Say about Racial Discrimination?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (2): 91-100.
• Becker, Gary S. 1971.The Economics of Discrimination. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Second Edition. First edition 1957.
• Becker, Gary S. 1992. “The Economic Way of Looking at Life.” Nobel Lecture, December 9.
• Card, David, Ana Rute Cardoso and Patrick Kline. 2015. “Bargaining, Sorting, and the Gender Wage Gap: Quantifying the Impact of Firms on the Relative Pay of Women.” National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper 21403.
• Charalampidis, Nikolaos. 2018. “The National Wealth–Income Ratio in Greece, 1974–2013.” Review of Income and Wealth 64 (1): 83-104.
• Chrissis, Kostas and Franciscos Koutentakis. 2019. “From Dictatorship to Crisis: The Evolution of Top Income Shares in Greece (1967-2017).” WID.world Working Paper N° 2019/14. August.  World Inequality Lab.
• Davis, Angela Y. 1983. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books. Originally published by Random House Inc. 1981.
• Deaton, Angus. 2021. “Covid-19 and Global Income Inequality.” National Bureau of Economic Research. Working Paper 28392.
• Emmanuel, Arghiri. 1972. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. With Additional Comments by Charles Bettelheim. Translated from the French by Brian Pearce. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Original French edition: Arghiri Emmanuel. 1969. L'Échange inégal - Essais sur les antagonismes dans les rapports économiques internationaux. - Préface et Remarques théoriques de Charles Bettelheim, Paris: François Maspéro, Collection « Economie et socialisme », N. 12.
• Engels, Friedrich. 1884. Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats: Im Anschluss an Lewis H. Morgan's Forschungen. Hottingen-Zürich: Verlag der Schweizerischen Volksbuchhandlung. [Fünfte Auflage, Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz 1892] [English edition: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. TranslatedbyErnestUntermann. Chicago:  Charles H. Kerr & Co. 1902.  Greek edition: Η καταγωγή της οικογένειας, της ατομικής ιδιοκτησίας και του κράτους. Αθήνα: Σύγχρονη Εποχή. 197? (2013).
• Jones, Charles I. 2015. "Pareto and Piketty: The Macroeconomics of Top Income and Wealth Inequality." Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 29-46.
• Kopczuk, Wojciech. 2015. "What Do We Know about the Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 47-66.
• Kuznets, Simon. 1955. “Economic Growth and Income Inequality.” The American Economic Review, 45 (1): 1–28.
• Lang, Kevin, and Ariella Kahn-Lang Spitzer. 2020. “Race Discrimination: An Economic Perspective.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34 (2): 68-89.
• Lucas Jr., Robert E. 1988. “On the Mechanics of Economic Development.” Journal of Monetary Economics, 22 (1): 3-42.
• Mankiw, N. Gregory, David Romer, and David N. Weil. 1992. “A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107 (2): 407–437.
• Milanovic, Branko. 2016.  Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Phelps, Edmund S. 1972. “The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism.” The American Economic Review 62 (4): 659–61.
• Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. First published as Le capital au XXI siècle, copyright © 2013 Éditions du Seuil.
• Piketty, Thomas. 2015. “About ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century.’” The American Economic Review 105 (5): 48–53.
• Piketty, Thomas. 2015. “Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 29 (1): 67-88.
• Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman. 2014. “Capital Is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 129 (3): 1255–1310.
• Review of Economics and Economic Methodology. 2021. Special Issue: Inequity, Inequality, Insecurity. 5 (1). Autumn
• Saez, Emmanuel. 2021. “Public Economics and Inequality: Uncovering Our Social Nature.” American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings, 111: 1-26.
• Shaikh, Anwar. 2017. “Income Distribution, Econophysics and Piketty.” Review of Political Economy 29 (1): 18-29.
• Shaikh, Anwar, Nikolaos Papanikolaou and Noe Wiener. 2014. “Race, Gender and the Econophysics of Income Distribution in the USA.” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 415: 54-60.
• Solow, Robert M. 1956. “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 70 (1): 65–94.
• Stravelakis, Nikos. 2022. “The Greek Crisis in Retrospect: The Rate of Profit Approach.” Investigación Económica, 81 (321): 30–61.
• World Inequality Report 2022. Coordinated by Lucas Chancel (Lead author) Thomas Piketty Emmanuel Saez Gabriel Zucman. Foreword by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Country Sheets. World Inequality Lab.

Textbooks on Economic Growth

• Acemoglu, Daron. 2009. Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Aghion, Philippe, and Peter Howitt with the collaboration of Leonardo Bursztyn. 2009. The Economics of Growth. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Barro, Robert J., and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. 2004. Economic Growth. Second edition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Handbook

• Aghion, Philippe and Steven N. Durlauf (eds). Handbook of Economic Growth. Vol. 1 (A&B) 2005. Vol. 2 (2014). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Readings

• Solow, Robert M. (ed.). 2001. Landmark Papers in Economic Growth. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Texts on Inequality

• Atkinson, A.B. 1983. The Economics of Inequality. Second edition. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
• Sen, Amartya. 1973. On Economic Inequality: The Radcliffe lectures delivered in the university of Warwick 1972. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
• Sen, Amartya. 1995. Inequality Reexamined. New York and Oxford: Russell Sage Foundation and Clarendon Press.

Assessment

Combined grading 1) minor assignment (homework first lecture) 5%, 2) major assignment (Christmas homework) 15%, 3) seminar paper or written exam 80%.