Search

We study the income concentration in the Swiss federation over the course of the 20th century using federal income tax statistics. The results suggest that top incomes in Switzerland evolved over time rather remaining constant across different income shares. Income concentration peaked during the 1940s, with a slight downward trend until the 1990s. Over the last 15 years, top incomes have recovered. In contrast, the evolution of income concentration is much more heterogeneous on the sub-federal level for the 26 cantons because of the federalist constitution, which has a decentralized taxing power. Consequently, top incomes in some cantons have a downward trend; others show a fall and rise of top incomes over the century, as exemplified by the Kuznets' hypothesis; some develop rather constantly; and some cantons even produce a striking upward trend.

Realized capital gains are typically disregarded in the study of income inequality. We showthat in the case of Sweden this severely underestimates the actual increase in inequalityand, in particular, top income shares during recent decades. Using micro panel data to averageincomes over longer periods and re-rank individuals according to income excludingcapital gains, we show that capital gains indeed are a reoccurring addition to rather than atransitory component in top incomes. Doing the same for lower income groups, however,makes virtually no difference. We also try to find the roots of the recent surge in capitalgains-driven inequality in Sweden since the 1980s. While there are no evident changes interms of who earns these gains (high wage earners vs. top capital income earners), the primarydriver instead seems to be the drastic asset price increases on the post-1980 deregulatedfinancial markets. Also published in Working paper / Department of Economics, Uppsala University (Online), ISSN 1653-6975; 2011:7.

This paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses, consumption is taxed, and the skill distribution is unbounded. Optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for Germany using a dataset that includes the tax returns of all German top taxpayers. We find that the optimal top marginal tax rate converges to about 2/3 and convergence obtains at income levels that are substantially higher than those currently subject to the actual top tax rate.

This paper presents new statistical evidence on the long-term evolution of economic inequality in Portugal. Portuguese tax sources have been employed to estimate top income and wealth shares (TIS and TWS) from 1936 onwards. The new series shows that the Second World War had a negative and non-permanent effect on the evolution of TIS, but not on TWS, which increased until the mid 1950s. From the mid 1950s to the early 1980s, there was a sharp decline in TIS and TWS. Finally, during the 1990s, TIS increased again. The reasons behind the Portuguese distributive pattern seem to be more economic than political. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar nueva información estadística sobre la evolución de las desigualdades económicas en Portugal a largo plazo. La explotación de las fuentes fiscales portuguesas ha permitido la estimación de las top income and wealth shares (TIS y TWS) desde 1936. Estas nuevas series revelan que la Segunda Guerra Mundial tuvo un impacto negativo no permanente sobre las TIS, pero no sobre las TWS. Desde mediados de los cincuenta hasta principios de los ochenta, TIS y TWS cayeron con intensidad. Finalmente, durante los años noventa las TIS volvieron a aumentar. Las razones que hay detrás de la pauta distributiva portuguesa parecen ser más de índole económica que política. Financial support from the research Project ECO2009-13331-C02-02 financed by Innovation and Science Ministry of Spain, the Economic History Department (UB), the R1D1I Reference Network in Economics and Public Policies of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the ESF (GlobalEuroNet) is gratefully acknowledged.

In this paper we use newly compiled top income share data to estimate common breaks and trends across countries over the twentieth century. By using the most re-cent structural breaks techniques, our approach both confirms previous notions and offers new insights. In particular, the division into an Anglo-Saxon and a Continental European experience does not seem to be as clear cut as previously suggested. Some continental European countries have had increases in top income shares, just as in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but typically with a lag. Most notably, we find that the Nordic countries display a marked “Anglo-Saxon” pattern, with sharply increased top income shares. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon countries, however, including realized capital gains seems important in these countries. Our results help inform theories about the causes of the recent rise in inequality.

Does a rising tide lift all boats? This question – that is, to what extent does improvements of the general economy benefit all – is central to the study of economics and history. From fundamental issues about whether market forces have an innate tendency to increase or decrease differences in economic outcomes, to much debated questions about the effects of government policies, distributional concerns are always present. In this dissertation, a novel dataset of international long-term income wealth inequality data is presented and used to shed new light on long-standing issues in economic history. What were the distributional impacts of the industrial revolution? Who gains and who loses the most from the outbreak of a financial crisis? Has progressive taxation been a successful way to redistribute resources from the rich to the rest of the population? Several important findings come out of the analyses presented. A general result is that whereas nineteenth century industrialization had a mixed impact on inequality across the Western world the twentieth century experience, including a rapid growth of government, educational reforms and the introduction of progressive taxation, uniformly equalized societies.

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility in the top of the income and earnings distribution. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden, we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong in the top, more so for income than for earnings. In the extreme top (top 0.1 percent) income transmission is remarkable with an IG elasticity above 0.9. We also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that sons’ IQ, non-cognitive skills and education are all unlikely channels in explaining this strong transmission. Within the top percentile, increases in fathers’ income are, if anything, negatively associated with these variables. Wealth, on the other hand, has a significantly positive association. Our results suggest that Sweden, known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general, is a society where transmission remains strong in the very top of the distribution and that wealth is the most likely channel.

This paper analyzes income and earnings concentration in Portugal from a long-run perspective using personal income and wage tax statistics. Our results suggest that income concentration was much higher during the 1930s and early 1940s than it is today. Top income shares estimated from reported incomes deteriorated during the Second World War, even if Portugal did not take active participation in the conflict. However, the magnitude of the drop was less important than in other European countries. The level of concentration between 1950 and 1970 remained relatively high compared to countries such as Spain, France, UK or the United States. The decrease in income concentration, started very moderately at the end of the 1960s and which accelerated after the revolution of 1974, began to be reversed during the first half of the 1980s. During the last fifteen years top income shares have increased steadily. The rise in wage concentration contributed to this process in a significant way. The evidence since 1989 suggests that the level of marginal tax rate at the top has not been the primary determinant of the level of top reported incomes. Marginal rates have stayed constant in a context of growing top shares., Ce travail présente des séries sur les hauts revenus et les hauts salaires en Portugal entre 1936 et 2004, construites à partir de données fiscales et fichiers administratifs.Le Portugal est un cas spécial de pays doté d'une structure bureaucratique bien organisée en ce qui concerne l'imposition sur le revenu, influencée par la stabilité du régime autoritaire au pouvoir entre 1926 et 1974. Les dossiers administratifs et les données étaient régulièrement publiés depuis 1936. Malheureusement, ces archives et données présentent un blanc entre 1983 et 1988, une période durant laquelle de nombreuses réformes fiscales ont été introduites, ainsi que la transition entre l'ancien et le nouvel impôt sur le revenu réalisée en 1989. Les résultats montrent une relative stabilité des parts des hauts revenus entre la fin de la seconde Guerre mondiale et la fin des années 1960, suivie de dynamiques en forme de U, le bras ascendant du U apparaissant à partir du début des années 1980 quand les réformes ont été introduites afin de satisfaire aux conditions d'accession à la Communauté Economique Européenne. Des données-micro disponibles concernant les salaires mettent aussi à jour une augmentation de la part des hauts salaires.

This paper presents new evidence on intergenerational income and earnings mobility in the top of the distributions. Using a large dataset of matched father-son pairs in Sweden we are able to obtain results for fractions as small as 0.1 percent of the population. Overall, mobility is lower for incomes than for earnings and it appears to decrease the higher up in the distribution one goes. In the case of incomes, however, we find that mobility decreases dramatically within the top percentile of the population. Our results suggest that Sweden, well-known for its egalitarian achievements, is a society where equality of opportunity for a large majority of wage earners coexists with capitalistic dynasties.

The contribution Bach, Corneo, and Steiner (2008) has argued that the rich” do not pay taxes adequately in relation to their income, finding, for instance, an effective tax rate of only 38.1% for the 0.001% fractile of German income taxpayers in 2001. This result contrasts sharply with the legislated top marginal income tax rate of 48.5%. We subject the results contained in Bach, Corneo, and Steiner (2008) to a rigorous analysis: We find major flaws and inconsistencies with regard to methodology, i.e. the omission of corporate taxes and inter-temporal aspects of taxation. Restating basic rules for the measurement of effective tax rates, we provide values for what we term the comprehensive nominal tax rate” (CNTR) and show that the headline result in Bach, Corneo, and Steiner (2008) of 38.1% is underestimated by over 12 percentage points. As an important distributional result, the CNTR increases with increasing taxable income.

This paper presents series on top shares of income and wealth in Spain over the 20th century using personal income and wealth tax return statistics. Top income shares are highest in the 1930s, fall sharply during the first two decades of the Franco dictatorship, and have increased slightly since the 1960s, and especially since the mid-1990s. The top 0.01% income share in Spain estimated from income tax data is comparable to estimates for the United States and France over the period 1933-1971. Those findings, along with a careful analysis of all published tax statistics, suggest that income tax evasion and avoidance among top income earners in Spain before 1980 was much less prevalent than previously thought. Wealth concentration has been about stable from 1982 to 2004 as surging real estate prices have benefited the middle class and compensated for a slight increase in financial wealth concentration in the 1990s. We use our wealth series and a simple conceptual model to analyse the effects of the wealth tax exemption of stocks for ownersmanagers introduced in 1994. We show that the reform induced substantial shifting from the taxable to tax exempt status. This shifting has eroded the wealth tax base substantially and hence the tax exemption has generated large efficiency costs., Ce travail présente des séries sur les hauts revenus et les fortunes en Espagne entre 1933 et 2004, construites à partir de données fiscales. Les niveaux de concentration pendant les années 1930 sont les plus élevés, ils diminuent rapidement pendant les deux premières décennies de la dictature de Franco puis remontent depuis les années 1960, surtout à partir de la deuxiàme moitié des années 1990. La part des 0.01% les plus riches, évaluée à partir de données fiscales est comparable aux estimations existantes pour les Etats-Unis et la France entre 1933 et 1971. On montre que l'évasion et la fraude fiscales parmi les très hauts revenus étaient moins importantes que généralement admis. La concentration des fortunes présente une relative stabilité. On analyse les effets des modifications introduites en 1994 sur l'imposition du patrimoine et on démontre que l'exemption accordée aux dirigeants d'entreprise a introduit d'importantes pertes d'efficacité.

This paper studies determinants of income inequality using a newly assembled panel of 16 countries over the entire twentieth century. We focus on three groups of income earners: the rich (P99-100), the upper middle class (P90-99), and the rest of the population (P0-90). The results show that periods of high economic growth disproportionately increases the top percentile income share at the expense of the rest of the top decile. Financial development is also pro-rich and the outbreak of banking crises is associated with reduced income shares of the rich. Trade openness has no clear distributional impact (if anything openness reduces top shares). Government spending, however, is negative for the upper middle class and positive for the nine lowest deciles but does not seem to affect the rich. Finally, tax progressivity reduces top income shares and when accounting for real dynamic effects the impact can be important over time.

We analyze the distribution and concentration of market incomes in Germany in the period 1992 to 2001 on the basis of an integrated data set of individual tax returns and the German Socio-Economic Panel. The unique feature of this integrated data set is that it encompasses the whole spectrum of the population, from the very poor to the very rich. We find a modest increase in overall inequality of market incomes as measured by the Gini coefficient. However, we also document a substantial drop of median income and a remarkable income growth at the top 0.1% of the income distribution. The increase of income inequality was stronger in East Germany than in West Germany. In both regions, the income concentration process strongly benefited the economic elite, which we define as the richest 0.001% per-sons in the population. While the elite mainly obtains its income from business and capital, the income share that it receives in form of wage income is increasing.

This paper studies determinants of income inequality using a newly assembled panel of 16 countries over the entire twentieth century. We focus on three groups of income earners: the rich (P99-100), the upper middle class (P90-99), and the rest of the population (P0-90). The results show that periods of high economic growth disproportionately increases the top percentile income share at the expense of the rest of the top decile. Financial development is also pro-rich and the outbreak of banking crises is associated with reduced income shares of the rich. Trade openness has no clear distributional impact (if anything openness reduces top shares). Government spending, however, is negative for the upper middle class and positive for the nine lowest deciles but does not seem to affect the rich. Finally, tax progressivity reduces top income shares and when accounting for real dynamic effects the impact can be important over time.

This paper presents series on top shares of income in Argentina from 1932 to 2004 based on personal income tax return statistics. Our results suggest that income concentration was higher during the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s than it is today. The recovery of the economy after the Great Depression, favored by the international trade conditions during and after the Second World War, and the visible effects of the peronist policy between 1945 and 1955 generated an inverted U shape in the dynamics of top shares. The peronist redistributive policy, successful and visible, seemed to have proved limited when compared with the central economies. Since then, and after a new upward movement between 1955 and 1959, the top shares seem to have described the U-shape pattern found in the developed English-speaking economies. The levels of concentration in 1953 were very similar to those found in 1997., Ce travail présente des séries sur les hauts revenus en Argentine entre 1932 et 2004 construites à partir de données fiscales. Il apparaît que les niveaux de concentration durant les années trente et la première moitié des années quarante sont plus élevés qu'aujourd'hui. La Grande Dépression passée, l'économie est favorisée par les conditions du commerce international pendant et après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale ce qui crée une dynamique des hauts revenus en forme de U inversé. La comparaison des expériences économiques dans les différents pays développés met en évidence les limites de la politique de redistribution des deux premiers gouvernements péronistes, malgré leur grand succès auprès des classes ouvrières. Après une nouvelle période de croissance de 1955 à 1959, la dynamique des hauts revenus semble suivre un U semblable à celui trouvé dans les pays anglo-saxons. Les niveaux de concentration de 1997 sont très proches de ceux de 1953.

This study presents new homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden over the period 1903–2004. We find that, starting from levels of inequality approximately equal to those in other Western countries at the time, the income share of the Swedish top decile drops sharply over the first eighty years of the twentieth century. Most of the decrease takes place before the expansion of the welfare state and by 1950 Swedish top income shares were already lower than in other countries. The fall is almost entirely due to a dramatic drop in the top percentile explained mostly by decreases in capital income, while the lower half of the top decile – consisting mainly of wage earners – experiences virtually no change over this period. In the past decades top income shares evolve very differently depending on whether capital gains are included or not. When included, Sweden's experience resembles that in the U.S. and the U.K. with sharp increases in top incomes. Excluding capital gains, Sweden looks more like the continental European countries where top income shares have remained relatively constant. A possible interpretation of our results is that Sweden over the past 20 years has become a country where it is more important to make the right financial investments than to earn a lot to become rich.

Globalization increasingly involves less-developed countries (LDCs), i.e., economies which usually suffer from severe imperfections in their financial systems. Taking these imperfections seriously, we analyze how credit frictions affect the distributive impact of trade liberalizations. We find that free trade significantly widens income differences among firm owners in LDCs: While wealthy entrepreneurs are better off, relatively poor business people lose. Intuitively, with integrated markets, profit margins shrink -- which makes access to credit particularly difficult for the least affluent agents. Richer entrepreneurs, by contrast, win because they can take advantage of new export opportunities. Our findings resonate well with a number of empirical regularities, in particular with the observation that some liberalizing LDCs have observed a surge in top-income shares.

This study presents new homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden over the period 1903 to 2004. We find that, starting from higher levels of inequality than in other Western countries, the income share of the Swedish top decile drops sharply over the first eighty years of the century. The fall is almost entirely due to a dramatic drop in the top percentile, while the lower half of the top decile experiences virtually no change over this period. Most of the decrease takes place before the expansion of the welfare state, in fact, by 1950 Swedish top income shares were already lower than in other countries. In the past decades the Swedish top income shares developed very differently depending on whether capital gains are included or not. Including them, Sweden's experience resembles that in the U.S. and the U.K. with sharp increases in top incomes, whereas excluding them Sweden looks more like the Continental European countries where top income shares have remained relatively constant. A possible interpretation of our results is that Sweden over the past 20 years has become a country where it is more important make the right investments than to have a high salary to become rich.

This study presents new homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden over the period 1903–2004. We find that, starting from levels of inequality approximately equal to those in other Western countries at the time, the income share of the Swedish top decile drops sharply over the first eighty years of the twentieth century. Most of the decrease takes place before the expansion of the welfare state and by 1950 Swedish top income shares were already lower than in other countries. The fall is almost entirely due to a dramatic drop in the top percentile explained mostly by decreases in capital income, while the lower half of the top decile – consisting mainly of wage earners – experiences virtually no change over this period. In the past decades top income shares evolve very differently depending on whether capital gains are included or not. When included, Sweden’s experience resembles that in the U.S. and the U.K. with sharp increases in top incomes. Excluding capital gains, Sweden looks more like the continental European countries where top income shares have remained relatively constant. A possible interpretation of our results is that Sweden over the past 20 years has been a country where it is more important to make the right financial investments than to earn a lot to become rich.

This paper presents homogenous series of top income shares in Sweden from 1903 to 2003 using individual tax returns data. We find that Swedish top incomes have developed more similarly to the US, Canada and the UK than to other continental European countries when capital gains are included. The top income shares are U-shaped over time, falling steadily until around 1980 when they start increasing again. Around 2000 they reach levels similar to those found around 1950, before the expansion of the Swedish welfare state. However, unlike the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the recent increases were mainly driven by increased wage earnings inequality, Swedish top income shares have risen almost exclusively due to capital gains, a finding consistent with relatively high marginal wage taxes and internationally high price increases in financial and real estate markets since 1980. When excluding capital gains the increase in top income shares since 1980 almost disappears and the Swedish experience looks more like that of continental Europe. Furthermore, we also find that the largest decrease of top income shares happens between 1935 and the beginning of the 1950s, but not (as in the US and in France) during the war years, but before 1939 and after 1945 suggesting that the Swedish development was more driven by policy than by exogenous shocks.

After increasing over more than a decade, recent studies based on household surveys data show that income inequality in Uruguay started to decline in 2008. In this study we assess whether this trend is robust to the use of novel micro-data from the recently restored Uruguayan personal income tax for the years 2009-2011. We analyze primary income and pensions and carry out to main comparative exercises. In the first part of the paper, we adjust household surveys to make them comparable to tax records. After that, we follow the methodology proposed by Atkinson et al (2011) and Alvaredo (2011) to compute top income shares and corrected inequality measures. We also investigate the redistributive effect of the personal income tax burden in the two data sets. Inequality indexes depict a similar trend in inequality reduction, even though the decrease is less sharp in tax records than in harmonized household surveys. According to our estimations from income tax data, the share of the top 1% did not decline in this period, and was situated around 14%. Household survey data underestimate the share of the top 1% in total income by approximately 3 p.p. and depict an opposite trend in the top shares evolution throughout the period compared to the one observed in income tax micro-data. This result might be revealing an increasing difficulty of ECH for capturing very high incomes. Finally, personal income tax in Uruguay redistributes roughly 2 p.p. of the Gini index. Effective tax rates exhibit a progressive pattern in the case of total income, labour income and pensions, whereas they are slightly regressive when considering capital income.

Resumo O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a composição da renda pessoal entre os 10% mais ricos do Brasil e sua evolução no período 2006 a 2012, a partir de tabulações de dados da Declaração de Imposto de Renda da Pessoa Física (DIRPF). Os dados originais foram reorganizados de modo a produzir uma classificação estável nesse período. A distribuição da renda foi obtida por interpolação de Pareto das tabulações. Os resultados indicam que, em média, no 1% mais rico, menos de metade dos valores totais declarados é de salários e aposentadorias, e mais de um terço predominantemente vinculado a capital, sendo um quarto lucros e um sexto aplicações financeiras e ganhos de capital. Entre 2006 e 2012 cresceu a participação dos rendimentos de capital no topo da distribuição de renda. Esses rendimentos são extremamente concentrados: três quartos dos lucros e dividendos, três quartos das rendas de aplicações financeiras e quatro quintos de todos os ganhos de capital dos 10% mais ricos são apropriados pelo 1% mais rico. Essas frações expressam, aproximadamente, a concentração na população inteira. O comportamento da desigualdade de renda entre 2006 e 2012 decorre de um aumento das rendas de capital no topo da distribuição compensando uma desconcentração dos rendimentos do trabalho, o que em parte explica a divergência de comportamento da desigualdade em relação à estimada em pesquisas domiciliares. Não foi possível calcular o quanto desse aumento é resultado de modificação contábil ou inflação. Abstract Using personal income tax data, we analyze the composition of the richest 10% of the Brazilian population, and its evolution between 2006 and 2012. We reorganized the original data to produce stable categories of income over the period. Pareto interpolations produced a distribution of income from tabulated data. The results highlight that, on average, in the top 1%, less than half of the income is composed of wages and pensions and more than one third of capital related incomes. Of these, one quarter is of profits and dividends, and one sixth is of income strictly related to capital, such as financial investments and capital gains. Between 2006 and 2012 the share of capital income increased at the top of the distribution. This income is extremely concentrated: three quarters of all profits and dividends, three quarters of all financial investments and four fifths of all capital gains of the top 10% are accrued by the top 1% of the population. To some extent these shares express the concentration across the entire population. The income inequality trends between 2006 and 2012 are the result of an increase in the share of capital income at the top of the distribution compensating a decrease in the concentration of labor income below the top 1%, which explains the divergence of trends between tax and survey data. We were not able to calculate how much of the former increase is due to inflation.