Estimados/as Académicos/as,

Les extendemos la invitación al seminario que organiza el Departamento de Economía, en el que se presentará el trabajo titulado "Can Inequality Define Economic Classes?".

Expone: Alejandro Corvalán, Profesor Asociado, Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial, Universidad de Chile

Abstract: Economic classes, defined as regions of the income distribution, are central to theories of growth, redistribution, and political economy. Their boundaries, however, are almost always imposed ex ante. This paper proposes an endogenous definition of economic classes based on how different regions of the income distribution respond to changes in inequality. Using nearly one million percentile-level income share observations from theWorld Inequality Database spanning 1980–2024, I recovered a remarkably stable partition into lower-, middle-, and upper-income classes across countries and over time, centered on a distributive pivot at the 87th percentile. Country-specific estimates reveal similar class structures, with the distributive pivot closely approximating the percentile whose income growth matches aggregate economic growth. This connection allows the size of economic classes to be determined endogenously, providing new evidence on the long-run contraction of the middle class. Taken together, these findings show that the income distribution contains enough information to identify its own economic class structure.

El formato será presencial en la sala P-303.

Saludos cordiales,

Dirección de Investigación