We argue that the Covid epidemic disproportionately affected the economic well-being and health of poor people. To disentangle the forces that generated this outcome, we construct a model that is consistent with the heterogeneous impact of the Covid recession on low- and high-income people....

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across...

We study trends in income inequality across U.S. states and counties 1960-2019 using a mix of administrative and survey data sources. Both states and counties have diverged in terms of per-capita pre-tax incomes since the late 1990s, with transfers serving to dampen this divergence. County...

We reassess the effect of state and federal minimum wages on U.S. earnings inequality using two additional decades of data and far greater variation in minimum wages than was available to earlier studies. We argue that prior literature suffers from two sources of bias and propose an IV strategy...

Although the vast majority of US research on trends in the inequality of family income is based on public-use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data, a new wave of research based on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return data reports substantially higher levels of inequality and faster...

Using earnings data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper analyzes the role of the employer in explaining the rise in earnings inequality in the United States. We first establish a consistent frame of analysis appropriate for administrative data used to study earnings inequality. We show that...

Access to IRS personal income tax records improves researchers' ability to track U.S. income and inequality, especially at the very top of the distribution (Piketty and Saez 2003). However, rather than following standard Haig-Simons income definitions, tax form income measures were designed to...

Why does inequality vary across societies? We advance the hypothesis that in a market economy, where earning differentials reflect variations in productive traits, a significant component of the differences in income inequality across societies can be attributed to variation in societal...

The rich live longer than the poor, but relatively little is known about the evolution of health inequality across the lifecycle. Using rich administrative data from the Netherlands, we develop an index of chronic disease burden based on the projected contribution to old-age mortality. Chronic...

We study the aggregate and distributional impact of product market interventions and profit taxes using a model of firm dynamics, credit constraints and incomplete markets. A key ingredient of our model is that markups are endogenous so that the markup a producer charges depends on the amount of...