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For which segments of the net wealth distribution are returns to wealth higher than growth rates of income? Although Piketty’s r > g is conceived as a tool to highlight distributional concerns, it does not account for covariation between real rates of return and position in the net wealth distribution. By exploiting large-scale administrative data on estimated gross and net personal wealth in Norway from 2010 to 2018, this paper establishes the first micro-level analysis of the difference between the real return on wealth and the real growth rate of total pre-tax income across the entire net wealth distribution. We show that, for the top half of the distribution, the aggregate R > G underestimates its micro counterpart r>g, whilst the opposite happens for the bottom half, indicating that the micro r > g qualifies as a more precise measure to thoroughly analyze the dynamics of wealth inequality. We show as well that around 44% of the variation in r > g when moving up from the bottom to the top decile of the net wealth distribution is associated with scale dependence, whilst the residual variation can be attributed to persistent heterogeneity.

How do banking crises a ect rich, middle-class and poor households? This paper quanti es the distributional implications of banking crises for a panel of 140 economies over the 1970-2017 period. We rely on di erent empirical settings, including an instrumental variable approach, that exploit the geographical di usion of banking crises across borders. Our results show that banking crises systematically reduce the income share of rich households and positively a ect middle-class households. We also nd that income inequality increases during periods preceding the triggering of a banking crisis.

International audience; This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID.world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades, but the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners.; Cet article présente brièvement la méthodologie des comptes nationaux distributifs, qui ventile le revenu national total et le patrimoine total entre résidents. Ces comptes permettent d’estimer des statistiques d’inégalité et de croissance par catégorie de revenu et niveau de patrimoine cohérentes avec la croissance agrégée des comptes nationaux. Cette méthodologie a récemment été appliquée à plusieurs pays et les données produites sont disponibles dans WID.world, base de données sur les inégalités mondiales. L’article résume les premières conclusions empiriques. Au cours des dernières décennies, nous observons dans la quasi-­totalité des pays une hausse de la part du revenu et du patrimoine détenue par les plus riches, mais l’ampleur de cette hausse varie fortement, ce qui suggère que les institutions et politiques des différentspays jouent un rôle. Nous combinons les statistiques nationales pour estimer les inégalités mondiales depuis 1980. Malgré le rattrapage de grands pays émergents comme la Chine et l’Inde, les inégalités mondiales ont augmenté depuis 1980. Cette évolution s’explique par la croissance desrevenus des personnes les mieux payées au niveau mondial.

International audience; We challenge the accepted wisdom of a global secular decline in the labor share. We document three issues: (i) starting periods for the empirical analysis; (ii) accounting for self-employment; and (iii) accounting for residential real estate income. An empirical analysis is carried out on the Euro Area (EA) and ten developed countries. When the three issues are set aside, the orientation of the labor share in the business sector appears not to be a general downward or upward one.

We challenge the accepted wisdom of a global secular decline in the labor share. A simple theoretical model is proposed to highlight the main factors of change in the labor share. We document three issues in the existing literature : (i) starting periods for the empirical analysis ; (ii) accounting for self‑employment ; and (iii) accounting for residential real estate income. An empirical analysis is carried out since the post‑war period for France and the United States, and since the 1990s for ten developed countries and on a six‑country “euro area”. How the three questions above are addressed is crucial to the diagnosis. When the biases that may arise with the three issues mentioned above are eliminated, the labor share in the market sector does not show a general downward or upward trend. The choice of period has a huge impact, as does the treatment of real estate services, whose inclusion or not in the value added can result in significantly different trends., Cette Gilbert, Koehl Lorraine, Philippon Thomas. The Labor Share in the Long Term: A Decline?. In: Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, n°510-512, Special Issue 50th Anniversary. pp. 35-51.

For each production or utility function, we can define the corresponding elasticities of substitution functions; but is the reverse true? This paper shows that yes, and that this link is fruitful. By inverting the system of partial differential equations defining the elasticities of substitution functions, we uncover an analytical formula which encompasses all production and utility functions that are admissible in Arrow-Debreu equilibria. We highlight the "Constant Elasticities of Substitution Matrix" (CESM) class of functions which, unlike the CES functions, does not assume uniform substitutability among all pairs of goods. A shortcoming of our method is that it permits only to control for local concavity while it is difficult to control for global concavity.

International audience; This article reviews various issues linked to the rise in inequality observed in a number of countries, particularly developed countries, over the past quarter century. Various sources of evidence regarding the time profile of inequality are examined and do not always fit the common view that inequality is trending upward everywhere. Overall, changes in inequality appear to be very country-specific. The same conclusion does obtain when examining the causes of these changes. There is little doubt that there are common forces affecting the distribution of income in most countries, but idiosyncratic factors have enhanced their effects in some cases and offset them in others. Country specificity also holds with regard to policies aimed at correcting inequality, even though globalization imposes constraints on some key redistribution instruments like taxation and the regulation of financial markets. International coordination and, in particular, more transparency in cross-border financial operations are needed for governments to recover some autonomy in these matters.

In this paper, we use tax and household survey data to assess the history of income distribution in Argentina since the beginning of the 20th century. Until the 1970s, the country experienced a fall in inequality in spite of lower income growth. Since then, inequality has generally increased possibly as a result of large-scale shocks such as macroeconomic crises and reform attempts, resulting in a convergence towards traditionally more unequal neighboring countries., Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

International audience; Standard monopsony theory, old and new, lacks a realistic criterion to distinguish between monopsony and competitive prices. Consequently, prominent Austrian critics have by and large dismissed it. However, the idea that human action occurs in discrete steps, and consequently that the elasticity of the supply schedules for factors of production, as well as the elasticity of the demand schedules for their products, can be altered as a result of coercion, lead to a theory of "monopoly price-gap", with monopoly and monopsony prices as two features of the same phenomenon.

International audience; This article analyses the linkages between financial development, labour market institutions and market income inequality for 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries over the 1980 to 2012 period. With the help of a dynamic panel data model with an interacted term, one crucial contribution of this article is to analyse the interacted impact of labour market institutions (i.e. union density and employment protection legislation) on the one hand and financial development on the other hand on the income distribution. Our results indicate that changes in the financial/credit and labour market regulation affect the income distribution. Estimates of the marginal effects show that by increasing labour market regulation one also weakens the impact of the flexibilization in the financial/credit market on the increase in income inequality.

In the middle of the 90s, the sharp increase in globalization and the last privatization wave have promoted the shaping of a market for executives in France. Characteristics of this market are estimated for France and a competitive model is simulated in order to assess to what extent such a model can reproduce the observed chief executive officer (CEO) compensations. The size elasticity of CEOs' compensations in France is equal to 0.5 and justifies a large magnitude in compensations. To moderate these compensations, a wage cap is often called for not only by opinion and the European Left but also, more surprisingly, by representatives of shareholders. The cost of this policy is evaluated in this job assignement model and the lobbying of shareholders is investigated and explained above some thresholds. (JEL codes: J31, J33, D33, D41) Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.

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 a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debt leverage of low- and middle-income households, and an eventual financial and real crisis. The paper presents a theoretical model where higher leverage and crises are the endogenous result of a growing income share of high-income households. The model matches the profiles of the income distribution, the debt-to-income ratio and crisis risk for the three decades preceding the Great Recession. (JEL D14, D31, D33, E32, E44, G01, N22)

International audience; This paper uses data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine some of the forces that have driven changes in household income inequality over the last three decades of the twentieth century. We decompose inequality for six countries (Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.) into the three sources of market income (earnings, property income, and income from self-employment) and taxes and transfers. Our findings indicate that although changes in the distribution of earnings are an important force behind recent trends, they are not the only one. Greater earnings dispersion has in some cases been accompanied by a reduction in the share of earnings which dampened its impact on overall household income inequality. In some countries the contribution of self-employment income to inequality has been on the rise, while in others, increases in inequality in capital income account for a substantial fraction of the observed distributional changes.

International audience; The aim of this paper is to reassess the contributions of Barone to the theory of marginal productivity. While Walras chooses to minimize the production costs to demonstrate the validity of the theorem, Barone prefers to use the principle of profit maximization. However, that difference of reasoning was not often underlie in the history of economic thought. So we propose to deepen the approach of Barone through publications such as Studi sulla Distribuzione (1896) and Il Ministro nello Stato della produzione collectivista (1908) to explain how he can integrate different structures of competition and enriches the theory of the marginal productivity.; L'article réévalue les apports de Barone à la théorie de la productivité marginale. Alors que Walras choisit de minimiser les coûts de production pour démontrer la validité du théorème des productivités marginales, Barone préfère maximiser les profits. Cette différence a été peu soulignée par les historiens de la pensée économique. Nous revisitons la démarche de Barone, au regard de ses publications (Studi sulla distribuzione, 1896 et Il Ministro della produzione nello Stato collectivista, 1908) pour expliquer comment il intègre différentes structures de concurrence et enrichit la théorie de la productivité marginale.

Many empirical studies on the determinants of international migration flows rely exclusively on macro data, and do not account for migrants' self-selection. We analyze a very interesting episode in international migration for which we are able to gather individual-level data covering all relevant countries, namely the exodus of Ecuadorians to Spain and the US in the aftermath of the economic collapse of 1999. Specifically, we produce selection-corrected predictions of counterfactual individual earnings and use them to estimate a discrete-choice migration equation that allows for correlated errors across destinations and a rich structure of migration costs. We find that earnings significantly shape individual migration decisions, even in an episode in which Ecuadorians mostly chose Spain where earnings were lower than in the US, and they contribute to explaining the observed composition of migration flows. Moreover, our estimates show that changes in earnings at a particular destination have a larger effect on destination choice conditional on migration than on the scale of migration.

National audience; In the middle of the nineties, the sharp increase in globalisation and the last privatization wave promoted the shaping of a market for executives in France. Characteristics of this market are estimated for France and a competitive model is simulated in order to assess to what extent such a model could explain the observed ceo compensations. The size elasticity of compensation in France is equal to 0.5 and justifies a large magnitude in compensation. To moderate these compensations, a wage cap is often called for by opinion and the European Left but also, more surprisingly, by representatives of shareholders. The cost of this policy is evaluated in this job assignement model and the lobbying of shareholders is explained.; En France, au milieu des années 1990, la mondialisation croissante et la dernière vague de privatisations ont favorisé la formation d'un marché du travail spécifique, celui des dirigeants de grandes entreprises. Les caractéristiques de ce marché sont estimées pour la France (2003-2005) dans le cadre d'un modèle concurrentiel. Ces estimations permettent de mener un exercice de simulation afin de comparer les prédictions du modèle théorique avec les niveaux des salaires des p-dg observés. L'élasticité de la rémunération des p-dg à la taille de leur entreprise est égale à 0,5 et justifie des écarts considérables de rémunération. Pour modérer ces compensations, un plafonnement des salaires est souvent réclamé en Europe, par l'opinion et les partis de gauche mais également par des représentants d'actionnaires. Le coût de cette politique est évalué dans ce modèle concurrentiel, et le lobbying des actionnaires, en particulier des petites entreprises, est expliqué.