In this paper, I attempt to extend insights regarding statistical aggregates, from scholars such as Hayek (1931) and Mises (1947), to the topic of inequality. Using the work of Lindert and Williamson (2016), I show that a disaggregation of inequality into some of its many subcomponents alters...

Long term measures of income inequality must grapple with the challenges presented by incomplete historical records. In this paper we examine one such problem affecting the quality of federal income tax return data in the period between the two World Wars, which form the basis for the widely...

The kinds of goods that richer and poorer households consumed differed more strongly in the past than today. Movements in the relative prices of luxury goods versus staples caused the real inequality to oscillate in ways missed by the usual historiography of (nominal) inequality. On both sides...

In the present paper, I intend to question the broad "U-Curve Narrative" of income inequality in the United States. First, I argue that a part of the rise of inequality in recent decades is overestimated but that it did nonetheless increase. Second, I argue that a part of that increase in...

In this article, we offer a revision to the top income share series produced by Piketty and Saez (2003) for the United States, focusing upon the period prior to and including the Second World War. The inequality estimates for these years form the left-side of a century-long U-curve that has...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...