Top incomes, wealth and inheritance: special issue in homage to Tony Atkinson

Taxing Top Ceo Incomes

We use a firm-CEO assignment framework to model the market for CEO effective labor. In the model’s equilibrium more talented CEOs match with and supply more effort to larger firms. Taxation of CEO incomes affects the equilibrium pricing of CEO effective labor and, hence, spills over and affects firm profits. Absent the ability to tax profits or a direct concern for firm owners, a standard presc...

Special Thanks to Top 10 Peer Reviewers

This articlahas no abstract.

Taxing Top Incomes

We model high income earners as sellers of quality services in a competitive assignment framework. Sellers (high income earners) are differentiated by ability; buyers by their taste for the service. There is assortative matching of buyers and sellers. We show that conventional optimal tax formulas are modified both by a social concern for buyers and an altered mapping of the talent into the inc...

Top Incomes and National Savings

The relationship between income inequality and national savings is theoretically ambiguous, and past empirical studies have delivered mixed results. We revisit the question using a newly available source of data on inequality: the income share of the richest 10 percent and the richest 1 percent. Combining this with historical data on national savings rates, we are able to investigate the relati...

Special Issue