Of all the potential consequences of rising economic inequality, none is more worrisome, or more difficult to study, than the possibility that rising inequality will have the long-run effect of reducing equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility (IGM). Most studies of IGM look...

In brief, we find that inequality is high and rising in the United States, but the great majority of the increase was captured by the top end of the distribution since the mid-1990s—the top 1 percent in any given year and the top 5 to 10 percent overall—over the past 40 years. Overall...