Greater democracy increases the voice of the people, creating political contestation and participation, and leading to pro-labor institutional changes, higher wages and lower inequality. Political voice may therefore have a redistributive effect that is independent of redistribution through...

We employ Champernowne distribution and iterative techniques to document inequality in industrializing Britain, which rose then fell. This result is robust to: (a) different definitions of inequality; (b) how the untaxed out-of-sample population is defined; (c) changes in the highest income class;...