This chapter 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 …

Decades of research across several disciplines have produced substantial evidence that
labor unions, on balance, reduce economic disparities. But unions are complicated …

In this paper we revisit the relationship between democracy, redistribution, and inequality.
We first explain the theoretical reasons why democracy is expected to increase redistribution …

The rise of inequality in advanced economies, and in particular the growing concentration of
incomes at the top of the distribution, has become a greater focus of attention for economists …

A recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more
than twenty countries using income tax statistics. Top incomes represent a small share of the …

Political scientists increasingly recognize that multiple imputation represents a superior
strategy for analyzing missing data to the widely used method of listwise deletion. However …

Focusing on developed countries, I present a model explaining how firms help determine
rates of income inequality at the societal level. I propose that the manner in which firms …

Research on the economic origins of democracy and dictatorship has shifted away from the
impact of growth and turned toward the question of how different patterns of growth-equal or …

The fundamental question of political theory, one that precedes all other questions about the
nature of political life, is why there is a state at all. Is human cooperation feasible without a …

Rising income inequality from the mid-1990s to the present was characterized by rapid
income growth among top earners and new patterns of employment and income pooling …