The income distribution in many developed countries widened dramatically from 1970 to 2000. Some scholars argue that income inequality contributes to a host of social ills by undermining voters' willingness to support public expenditures. In contrast, we find that growing income inequality is...

Although most U.S. income inequality research is based on public use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax return data reports substantially faster inequality growth for recent years. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled when the income...

Suppose that all people in the world are allocated only two characteristics over which they have (almost) no control: country of residence and income distribution within that country. Assume further that there is no migration. We show that more than one-half of variability in income of world...