Tax administration statistics now provide considerably more complete and reliable measures of South African personal income and its distribution than the available household or other survey sources. However, there are difficulties in using tax data across time, as both policy and reporting...

This paper analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since 1992, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. Inequality rose from the 1990s to the late 2000s due to falling labor incomes among the bottom 50% and...

Mobility of top incomes matters for both the openness of the income elite and the share of total income that this group receives. It is thus an important complement information to the growing snapshot literature on top income concentration. I use microlevel panel data of German income tax files...

This paper is about “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” by Thomas Piketty. It identifies his central macroeconomic claims and examines them, arguing that the contentions are theoretically and empirically unwarranted.

A large literature has documented top income share series based on income tax statistics using the common methodology established by Piketty (2001, 2003). The disappearance of capital income from the income tax base in many countries poses a major challenge to the comparability of these series...

In this paper, we estimate the recent evolution of global interpersonal inequality and examine the effect of omitted top incomes on the level and direction of global inequality. We propose a methodology to estimate the truncation point of household surveys by combining information on income...

The Mincer equation-arguably the most widely used in empirical work-can be used to explain a host of economic, and even non-economic, phenomena. One such application involves explaining (and estimating) employment earnings as a function of schooling and labor market experience. The Mincer...

Comparative sociologists have long considered occupations to be a key source of inequality. However, data constraints make comparative research on two of the more important contemporary drivers of occupational stratification - globalization and technological change - relatively scarce. This...