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The minimum wage has been regarded as an important element of public policy for reducing poverty and inequality. Increasing the minimum wage is supposed to raise earnings for millions of low-wage workers and therefore lower earnings inequality. However, there is no consensus in the existing literature from industrialized countries regarding whether increasing the minimum wage has helped lower earnings inequality. China has recently exhibited rapid economic growth and widening earnings inequality. Since China promulgated new minimum wage regulations in 2004, the magnitude and frequency of changes in the minimum wage have been substantial, both over time and across jurisdictions. The growing importance of research on the relationship between the minimum wage and earnings inequality and its controversial nature have sparked heated debate in China, highlighting the importance of rigorous research to inform evidence-based policy making. We investigate the contribution of the minimum wage to the well-documented rise in earnings inequality in China from 2004 to 2009 by using city-level minimum wage panel data and a representative Chinese household survey, and we find that increasing the minimum wage reduces inequality – by decreasing the earnings gap between the median and the bottom decile – over the analysis period.

The extent to which firms repatriate indefinitely reinvested foreign earnings (IRFE) has been a major issue in the US tax system. Congress enacted provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) specifically to remove tax barriers to repatriation. However, little is known regarding the repatriation of IRFE outside of the temporary tax incentive provided by the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act (AJCA). In this chapter, I provide evidence on such repatriations by identifying a sample of 67 firms from 2009 to 2015 that reverse the indefinite reinvestment designation of foreign earnings and announce a repatriation of foreign cash. In contrast to repatriations following the 2004 AJCA, I do not find evidence that a single economic factor, such as share repurchases, motivates the repatriation. Although, in general, I do not find evidence of a significant market response to the announcements, I find evidence of a negative market reaction to announcements by low foreign effective tax rate (ETR) firms without tax offsets, suggesting that the tax may not be fully priced. Overall, I provide insight into the reasons and implications of the announced repatriation of IRFE.

Are radically novel practices more likely to attract recognition when the evaluating audience is composed of external evaluators? Our baseline argument asserts that radical novelty is more likely to be positively evaluated by an external audience and that peripheral (rather than core) producers have higher incentives to adopt novel practices that depart from tradition. Yet, because peripheral producers often lack the necessary support and legitimacy to promote novelty, audiences play a critical role in recognizing their innovative efforts. How can peripheral producers mitigate the challenges associated with novelty recognition? To answer this question, we explore how peripheral producers’ collaboration with acclaimed consultants affects the process of external audience recognition in the context of the Italian wine field from 1997 to 2006. Our findings suggest that radical novelty is positively received by an external audience composed of critics, although we do not find a significant difference between core and peripheral producers. However, external audiences are more open to recognizing peripheral producers’ use of novel practices when they collaborate with well-connected consultants. We find that the use of central consultants produces a “boosting” effect that accentuates the differences between evaluations of peripheral producers who embrace novelty and evaluations of those that follow the tradition. Our study thus advances theory by providing empirical evidence of the value of considering third-party actors such as consultants, who sit at the nexus between the agency required for innovation and external audiences’ recognition of novelty, when studying novelty evaluation and recognition.

This paper introduces the readers to Neo-Transitional Economics – a volume which aspires to reinvigorate scholarly interest in transition economics research. The classical transition storyline is briefly revisited, and new directions for empirical and policy-relevant research that target post-transition economies in the post-crisis paradigm are highlighted.

The study of the upper tail of the income and wealth distributions is important to the understanding of economic inequality. By means of the ‘isograph’, a new tool to describe income or wealth distributions, the authors compare wealth and income and wealth-to-income ratios in 16 European countries and the United States using data for years 2013/2014 from the Eurozone Household Finance and Consumption Survey and the US Survey on Consumer Finance. Focussing on the top half of the distribution, the authors find that for households in the top income quintile, wealth-to-income ratios generally increase rapidly with income; the association between high wealth and high incomes is highest among the highest percentiles. There is generally a positive relationship between median wealth in the country and the wealth of the top 1%. However, the United States is an outlier where the median wealth is relatively low but the wealth of the top 1% is extremely high.

In this chapter, authors take a narrative/interpretive approach by sharing insights from millennials and Generation Z as to the definition of kindness as a behaviour and action. Sixty-six individuals living in North America, Africa and Europe were interviewed during the pandemic (October 2020). They were asked to describe an incident in which they expressed kindness and/or in which it was expressed to them. Authors identified five themes (metapatterns) which denote different ways kindness is described through narrative. These kindness behaviours include: (1) kindness as a small act, (2) kindness as an event, (3) kindness as intervention and (4) kindness as consideration. The fifth form of kindness operates with more performative qualities, and the authors' have dubbed it as ‘kindness [that] makes me feel good’. Authors attempt not to constrain or essentialize what kindness behaviour is, but rather to reveal patterns while also leaving room for possibilities.

Beginning from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, crypto assets have intensely been in the spotlight and have attracted significant investor attention. By being the first blockchain product, Bitcoin is the first crypto asset and still dominates the entire crypto market capitalization. In this study, we shed light on whether this energy-hungry crypto asset is an effective tool for portfolio volatility reduction from the perspective of the Modern Portfolio Theory. Based on a two-year period from April 2019 to April 2021, which includes the extreme impacts (crash and rally) of the pandemic on markets, we conclude that Bitcoin is not a beneficial instrument for volatility reduction if short-selling is not allowed. After removing this restriction, Bitcoin has very small negative investment weights in minimum variance portfolios. In other words, short-selling Bitcoin slightly reduces portfolio volatility.