We study the recent evolution of top incomes in Switzerland, analyzing both social security data on labor incomes and tax data on total income. The results show that in the last 20 years, the share of top incomes has risen, and the top 0.01% share even doubled, putting Switzerland similar to European countries for the top 1% group but closer to the U.S. for higher top incomes. However, top inco...

What drives the dynamics of top wealth inequality? To answer this question, I propose an accounting framework that decomposes growth share aggregate owned by a percentile into three terms: within term, which is average individuals initially in relative to economy; between accounts for entering and exiting due changes their rankings; demography or death population growth. obtain closed‐form expr...

David Campbell and Michael Parisi are economists with the Individual Statistics Branch Returns Analysis Section. This article was written under the direction of Jeff Hartzok, Chief. T axpayers filed 130.3 million returns for Tax Year 2001, of which almost 94.8 million (or 72.8 percent) were classified as taxable returns. Adjusted gross income (AGI) on taxable returns fell 4.0 percent to $5,847 ...

We investigate the association between adult health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top percentiles from 1913 to 2009. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to individual data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data for 1984-2009. Controlling for demograp...

The extent of and changes in inter-generational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but hard to measure. Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy (top 0.01%) in the United States peaked in the late 1960s, reaching almost 50%. Three decades on, women’s share had declined to one third, a return to pre-war le...

Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility Families, labor markets, and public policies all structure a child’s opportunities and determine the extent to which adult earnings are related to family background. Cross-country comparisons and the underlying trends suggest that these drivers will most likely lower the degree of intergenerational earnings mobility for ...