This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the United States using individual tax returns data. Top income and wages shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century. Our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced...

Just like economists, voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently. We model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the...

This paper develops a simple macroeconomic model that shows that combining capital market imperfections together with unequal access to investment opportunities across individuals can generate endogenous and permanent fluctuations in aggregate GDP, investment, and interest rates. Reducing...

This article attempts to document and account for the long-run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20--25% of national income between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple...

We analyze a randomized experiment in which 14,000 tax filers in H&R Block offices in St. Louis received matches of zero, 20 percent, or 50 percent of IRA contributions. Take-up rates were 3 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively. Among contributors, contributions, excluding the match,...

This paper analyzes the effects of dividend taxation on corporate behavior using the large tax cut on individual dividend income enacted in 2003. We document a 20 percent increase in dividend payments by nonfinancial, nonutility publicly traded corporations following the tax cut. An unusually...

This paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees' decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account (TDA) retirement plan within a large university. The experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of...

This paper analyzes optimal income transfers for low incomes. Labor supply responses are modeled along the intensive margin (intensity of work on the job) and along the extensive margin (participation into the labor force). When behavioral responses are concentrated along the intensive margin,...

This paper uses Social Security Administration longitudinal earnings micro data since 1937 to analyze the evolution of inequality and mobility in the United States. Annual earnings inequality is U-shaped, decreasing sharply up to 1953 and increasing steadily afterward. Short-term earnings...

This article analyzes the response of earnings to payroll tax rates using a cohort-based reform in Greece. Individuals who started working on or after 1993 face permanently a much higher earnings cap for payroll taxes, creating a large and permanent discontinuity in marginal payroll tax rates by...