Elites are those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource. We can
understand this as a position that a social actor occupies, or we can imagine such resources …

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 …

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of
national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts …

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic
inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global …

Despite a large body of literature examining the relationship between women on boards and
firm financial performance, the evidence is mixed. To reconcile the conflicting results, we …

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 …

“A short review cannot convey the rich variety of arguments and data Bartels deploys in
making his case…. Bartels shows that social issues do not create as strong a headwind …

Endogenous growth of trading countries has been studied with international knowledge
spillovers. These spillovers have typically been assumed to take place automatically. We …

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can be caused by changes in
the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920–1929 and 1983–2008 both exhibited …

We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze
the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one …