Distributional,National,Accounts: Methods,and,Estimates,for,the,United,States

By Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, G. Zucman. 2018

997 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pre-tax and post-tax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects inequality. Average pre-tax national income per adult has increased 60% since 1980, but we find that it has stagnated for the bottom 50% of the distribution at about $16,000 a year. The pre-tax income of the middle class—adults between the median and the 90th percentile—has grown 40% since 1980, faster than what tax and survey data suggest, due in particular to the rise of tax-exempt fringe benefits. Income has boomed at the top: in 1980, top 1% adults earned on average 27 times more than bottom 50% adults, while they earn 81 times more today. The upsurge of top incomes was first a labor income phenomenon but has mostly been a capital income phenomenon since 2000. The government has offset only a small fraction of the increase in inequality. The reduction of the gender gap in earnings has mitigated the increase in inequality among adults. The share of women, however, falls steeply as one moves up the labor income distribution, and is only 11% in the top 0.1% today.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc48b1bf098f14956f1d4003c45a41816d7ad409

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Citations in the corpus

Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility (2017, neutral): “The second factor that drives a wedge between trends in Pell shares and our percentile-based measures of access is the well-known fact that real incomes have fallen for low-income households in recent years (e.g., Piketty et al. 2016).”
CENTRAL BANK POLICIES AND INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY: A SURVEY (2019, neutral): “For instance, Atkinson et al. (2011) and Piketty et al. (2016) document that a substantial part of the rise in income inequality in the United States in recent decades was due to the rise of the top 1% income share, owing mainly to the upsurge in capital incomes.”
From Soviets to oligarchs: inequality and property in Russia 1905-2016 (2018, positive): “This methodology in three steps mirrors that used for China by Piketty et al. (2017), with a number of important differences.”
Unpacking the inequality paradox: The psychological roots of inequality and social class. (2018, background): “In the United States, class-related inequalities are more pronounced today than in at any time in the past 300 years (Lindert & Williamson, 2016; Piketty et al., 2016).”
A simpler theory of optimal capital taxation (2017, background): “27See Piketty et al. (2016) for an attempt to reconstruct the economic capital and labor incomes starting from tax data.”
Minimum Wages and Racial Inequality* (2020, methodology): “66 This is consistentwith assuming that the distribution of incomes Pareto distributed, with a pareto coefficient of 3, that is typically used in the literature on top-income earners (Piketty et al., 2018).”