Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century puts forth a logically consistent explanation for changes in income and wealth inequality patterns. However, while rich in data, the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain. In this paper, I build a set of...

Using microdata for 35 countries over the period 1985-1994-2002 we find that labor market institutions traditionally associated to more compressed wage structures are associated to a higher family gap. Our results indicate that these policies reduce the price effect of having children but...