We assemble a novel dataset of matched legislative and constituent votes and demonstrate that less income does not mean less representation. We show 1) The opinions of high and low income voters are highly correlated; the legislator's vote often reflects the desire of both. 2) What differences in...

Analysts often examine the black-white test score gap conditional on family income. Typically only a current income measure is available. We argue that the gap conditional on permanent income is of greater interest, and we describe a method for identifying this gap using an auxiliary data set to...

Building what we call social tables, this paper quantifies the level and inequality of American incomes from 1774 to 1860. In 1774 the American colonies had average incomes exceeding those of the Mother Country, even when slave households are included in the aggregate. Between 1774 and 1790,...

Have rising income and consumption at the top of income distribution since the early 1980s induced households in the lower tiers of the distribution to consume a larger share of their income? Using state-year variation in income level and consumption in the top first quintile or decile of the...

Earnings dynamics are much richer than typically assumed in macro models with heterogeneous agents. This holds for individual-pre-tax and household-post-tax earnings and across administrative (Social Security Administration) and survey (Panel Study of Income Dynamics) data. We estimate two...

We construct key household and individual economic variables using a panel micro data set from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) for 1994-2005. We analyze cross-sectional income and consumption inequality and find that inequality decreased during the 2000-2005 economic recovery....

There is robust evidence that higher minimum wages increase family incomes at the bottom of the distribution. The long run (3 or more years) minimum wage elasticity of the non-elderly poverty rate with respect to the minimum wage ranges between -0.220 and -0.459 across alternative...

This paper assesses the impacts across US household income groups of carbon taxes of various designs. We consider both the source-side impacts (reflecting how policies affect nominal wage, capital, and transfer incomes) and the use-side impacts (reflecting how policies alter prices of goods and...

Keynes's “Grandchildren” essay famously predicted both a rapid increase in productivity and a sharp shrinkage of the workweek – to fifteen hours – over the century from 1930. Keynes was right (so far) about output per capita, but wrong about the workweek. The key reason is that he failed...

We document the degree of educational assortative mating, how it evolves over time, and the extent to which it differs between countries. Our analysis focuses on the U.S. but also uses data from Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and Norway. We find evidence of positive assortative mating at all levels...