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Econ: What are Distributional Effects? 0 Views


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What are Distributional Effects? Distributional effects is a term describing the various kinds of impact a policy, project, or initiative may have upon various different demographic groups. For example, a rise in interest rates will affect homeowner mortgages, retirees on fixed incomes, students’ college loans, municipalities planning to issue bonds, and a panoply of other unrelated groups.

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Transcript

00:00

And finance Allah shmoop What are distributional effects All right

00:07

people Their economic policies you know things like taxes or

00:10

central bank policies Will the impact different groups of people

00:14

in different ways These are the distributional effects I eat

00:19

the way policies get distributed throughout a population right People

00:24

feel them differently Your town wants to attract more tourists

00:27

So the City Council decides to build a museum of

00:30

modern macaroni art Mama They need money for construction and

00:34

decide to pass a new tax to pay for it

00:36

After a lot of debate they enacted ten per cent

00:38

tax on all products related to beard maintenance So an

00:41

additional ten percent tax is added to all sales of

00:44

beard trimmers or beard wax or scented beard oils all

00:48

the stuff that a healthy beard needs Obviously this tax

00:51

hits some parts of the community harder than others In

00:54

general men need These products are whole lot more than

00:57

women at least more than most women anyway Also members

01:00

of the Civil War generals reenactment society end up paying

01:04

more in the beard tax Then the people should look

01:07

more like Dolphins swimming club run by Michael Phelps There

01:10

Greek Orthodox priests pay it more than members of the

01:13

Boy Scouts and so on the different parts of the

01:16

population and get distributed effects differently right That's distributional effects

01:20

at work Well distributional effects track the way the impacts

01:23

of an economic policy gets distributed among individual actors in

01:27

an economy and it comes up a lot In real

01:30

life central banks have to decide howto handle inflation policy

01:34

For example higher inflation helps people who have borrowed money

01:37

As wages go up they have more cash to pay

01:39

back loans which tend to have had fixed dollar amounts

01:43

and set interest rates Meanwhile lenders get better deals when

01:46

inflation is low anyway So yeah those were some of

01:49

the distributional effects of a country's inflation policies of relating

01:52

to the central bank and borrowing money anyway Different groups

01:55

are impacted in different ways The distributional effects can also

01:59

lead to behavior changes Like when your town's beard tax

02:03

went through well it encouraged a whole lot of people

02:06

to just shave their beards The Civil War Generals reenactment

02:09

society voted twelve the one to cut off their long

02:11

luxurious chin decorations and rebrand themselves as the Vietnam War 00:02:15.97 --> [endTime] generals re enactment society Oh

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