This essay discusses the policy debate concerning optimal taxation and the distribution of income.It begins with a brief overview of trends in income inequality, the leading hypothesis to explain thesetrends, and the distribution of the tax burden. It then considers the framework that economists...

We use a large linked employer-employee data set to analyze the importance of relativewage positions in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of jobsatisfaction. Our main findings are: (1) Workers with higher relative wage positionswithin their firms are on average more...