We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that...

Recent research on United States levels and trends in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. Piketty and Saez (2003) examine market income of tax units based on IRS tax return data, DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith (2012) and most CPS-based research uses pre-tax,...

Using the internal March CPS, we create and in this paper distribute to the larger research community a cell mean series that provides the mean of all income values above the topcode for any income source of any individual in the public use March CPS that has been topcoded since 1976. We also...

This paper presents a new framework for analyzing inequality that moves beyond the anonymity postulate. We estimate the determinants of sectoral choice and the joint distributions of outcomes across sectors. We determine which components of realized earnings variability are due to uncertainty...

Current global inequality measures assume that national-mean income does not matter to economic welfare at given household income, as measured in surveys. The paper questions that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and finds that prominent stylized facts about global inequality are...

and wealth shares series over the century for a number of countries using tax statistics. Most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the century due to a precipitous drop in large wealth holdings during the wars and depression shocks. Top income shares do...

Motivated by the recent rise of populism in western democracies, we develop a model in which a populist backlash emerges endogenously in a growing economy. In the model, voters dislike inequality, especially the high consumption of "elites." Economic growth exacerbates inequality due to...