The paper argues that the concentration of income at the top of the distribution, along with a decreasing taxation imposed on high incomes, may have affected OECD countries’ fiscal performances in recent decades. Using a panel of 17 OECD countries between 1975 and 2005, the paper presents the...

During the last thirty years most OECD countries have accumulated large public debts. The same period has been characterized by a considerable increase in the concentration of income at the top of the distribution and by substantial cuts to taxation imposed on high incomes. The paper argues that...

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...

Administrative tax data indicate that U.S. top income and wealth shares are substantial and increasing rapidly (Piketty and Saez 2003, Saez and Zucman 2014). A key reason for using administrative data to measure top shares is to overcome the under-representation of families at the very top that...

We use historical publications and – for more recent years – micro-data from the income tax and wealth tax returns to estimate the development in income inequality in Denmark over the last 140 years. The paper breaks new ground in treating the specific features of the Danish Tax system and...

This paper reviews the long run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are...

A large literature has documented top income share series based on income tax statistics using the common methodology established by Piketty (2001, 2003). The disappearance of capital income from the income tax base in many countries poses a major challenge to the comparability of these series...

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...

In this paper we aim to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the fiscal consolidation package adopted recently by the Italian Government in order to achieve a balanced budget by 2013. Revenues are forecasted to increase by more than 3.3 GDP percentage points; these stem mostly from indirect...

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Economic Crisis on individual preferences for redistribution in 23 European countries. After implementing a decomposition of the variation in these preferences, it is showed that the crisis was highly significant in increasing support for...