Income and Wealth Inequality

  • Nicholas Bloom
  • Raj Chetty
  • Emmanuel Saez

Leaders: Nicholas Bloom, Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez

The CPI is home to some of the country’s most influential analyses of the income and wealth distribution. The purpose of the Income and Wealth RG is to monitor the ongoing takeoff in income inequality, to better understand its sources, and to analyze its implications for labor market performance, educational attainment, mobility, and more. The following is a sampling of the CPI’s research projects within this area.

Trends in income and wealth inequality: What are the key trends in U.S. income and wealth inequality? The U.S. increasingly looks to Emmanuel Saez and his research team for the latest data on U.S. economic inequality.

Distributional National Accounts: In an ambitious infrastructural project, Emmanuel Saez and his team are building a “Distributional National Accounts” based on tax returns, a data set that will eliminate the current gap between (a) national accounts data based on economic aggregates and (b) inequality analysis that uses micro-level tax data to examine the distribution of income but is not consistent with national aggregates. This new data set will in turn make it possible to evaluate the extent to which economic growth, which has long been represented as a preferred poverty-reduction approach, is indeed delivering on that objective.

The rise of between-firm inequality: How much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attributed to increasing between-firm dispersion in the average wages they pay? This question can be addressed by constructing a matched employer-employee data set for the United States using administrative records.

Rent and inequality: It is increasingly fashionable to argue that “rent” accounts for much of the takeoff in income inequality. The Current Population Survey can be used to assess whether this claim is on the mark. 

CPI Collaborators

Daron Acemoglu's picture Daron Acemoglu Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Duane Alwin's picture Duane Alwin McCourtney Professor of Sociology and Demography, Director, Center on Population Health and Aging
Pennsylvania State University
Elijah Anderson's picture Elijah Anderson William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology
Yale University
Sir Tony Atkinson Deceased
University of Oxford, Nuffield College
David H. Autor Ford Professor of Economics, Director of National Bureau of Economic Research Disability Research Center; Co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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