Two of the world's leading economists, Philippe Aghion (a theorist) and Jeffrey Williamson (an economic historian), jointly question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience. Aghion assesses the effects of inequality on growth, and asks whether inequality is excessive inequality bad for growth, and is it possible to reconcile aggregate findings with microeconomic theories of incentives? Jeffrey Williamson then discusses the Kuznets hypothesis, and focuses on the causes of wage and income inequality in developed economies.
He is Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics, and an invited professor at the Paris School of Economics, having previously been Professor at University College London, an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and an Assistant Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).