Individual income is determined by free-will actions related to the level of effort exerted and by opportunities determined by aspects beyond the individual's control, such as family background, race, place of birth or health endowments. Taking human capital as the main engine of development, we...

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of seven aspects of rising inequality that are usually discussed separately: changes in labor's share of income; inequality at the bottom of the income distribution, including labor mobility; skill-biased technical change; inequality among high incomes;...

The rise in American inequality has been exaggerated both in magnitude and timing. Commentators lament the large gap between the growth rates of real median household income and of private sector productivity. This paper shows that a conceptually consistent measure of this growth gap over 1979...

A basic tenet of economic science is that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita. But our results raise doubts by creating a direct link between macro productivity growth and the micro evolution of the income distribution. We show that over the entire period...

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in macroeconomic conditions significantly affect income inequality. In this paper we hypothesize that the way in which macroeconomic conditions affect inequality depends on how these conditions influence the constituents of total inequality: inequality...

Using family income from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we apply Quantile Regression to estimate the Intergenerational Income Elasticity (IGE) by percentiles in the U.S. from 1980 to 2010. For the whole period, the IGE shows a Ushape across the income distribution, with maximum...