involuntary unemployment in economies with efficient risk sharing abstract we study economies where employment lotteries determine random layoffs and incomes for employed and unemployed agents allocate risk efficiently we ask for which specifications are unemployed agents worse off a situation we call involuntary unemployment we show unemployed agents are worse off iff an exogenous increase in wealth decreases aggregate unemployment in a monetary economy we show that in equilibrium the unemployed are worse off iff high inflation implies high unemployment our model also generates nominal wage stickiness as an equilibrium phenomenon but neither involuntary unemployment nor nominal stickiness implies these economies are operating inefficiently or are out of equilibrium

inequalities and the individualization of wealth abstract we document the individualization of wealth in france between 1998 and 2015 using precise survey data on the property titles of assets it is characterized by an increase in the share of wealth which is individualized by spouses vs jointly owned and by an increase in the share of wealth held by singles we show that the usual measures of wealth inequality which allocate the same share of household wealth to each spouse or partner overestimate the share of wealth held by women this results in an underestimation of both the level and the growth of a wealth inequality between individuals and b the gender wealth gap we argue for better consideration of the ownership status and intra household distribution of wealth in the measurement of wealth inequality

you can t manage right what you can t measure well technological innovation efficiency abstract this paper proposes a new approach to tackle the innovation performance relationship it addresses the so far mixed and inconclusive results of studies analyzing this relationship we argue that the undifferentiated use of innovation inputs and outputs to measure firm innovativeness is not without problems and that from a productive perspective they should be simultaneously analyzed this study follows a two stage empirical analysis using a sample of spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1992 2005 by examining two inputs and two outputs of the innovation process in the first stage we estimate technological innovation efficiency by means of an intertemporal data envelopment analysis dea bootstrap and also observe the yearly efficiency changes based on a global malmquist index in the second stage we analyze the effect of technological innovation efficiency on firm performance through a generalized method of moments gmm system the results support our arguments that the best measurement of outcomes of technological innovations is through the efficiency with which they are developed in addition we test the moderating effect of technological intensity level and firm size on the efficiency performance relationship

wealth taxation and wealth accumulation theory and evidence from denmark using administrative wealth records from denmark we study the effects of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation denmark used to impose one of the world s highest marginal tax rates on wealth but this tax was greatly reduced starting in 1989 and later abolished due to the specific design of the wealth tax the 1989 reform provides a compelling quasi experiment for understanding behavioral responses among the wealthiest segments of the population we find clear reduced form effects of wealth taxes in the short and medium run with larger effects on the very wealthy than on the moderately wealthy we develop a simple life cycle model with utility of residual wealth bequests allowing us to interpret the evidence in terms of structural primitives we calibrate the model to the quasi experimental moments and simulate the model forward to estimate the long run effect of wealth taxes on wealth accumulation our simulations show that the long run elasticity of taxable wealth with respect to the net of tax return is sizable at the top of the distribution

bumping layoffs and worksharing this paper deals with an interesting but often neglected labor practice prevalent in large north american firms with well developed internal labor markets large north american firms typically respond to a decline in demand for their products by first reducing the number of hours worked or worksharing as the demand continues to fall however they begin to make skilled workers bump onto unskilled jobs displacing unskilled workers skilled workers are laid off only after a considerable number have bumped i develop an implicit contract model and explain the practice

capital is back wealth income ratios in rich countries 1700 2010 how do aggregate wealth to income ratios evolve in the long run and why we address this question using 1970 2010 national balance sheets recently compiled in the top eight developed economies for the united states united kingdom germany and france we are able to extend our analysis as far back as 1700 we find in every country a gradual rise of wealth income ratios in recent decades from about 200 300 in 1970 to 400 600 in 2010 in effect today s ratios appear to be returning to the high values observed in europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 600 700 this can be explained by a long run asset price recovery itself driven by changes in capital policies since the world wars and by the slowdown of productivity and population growth in line with the s g harrod domar solow formula that is for a given net saving

taxing across borders tracking personal wealth and corporate profits globalization is making it increasingly easy for corporations to shift profits to low tax countries modern technology has also made it simpler for wealthy individuals to move funds to undeclared bank accounts in offshore tax havens both issues have featured prominently in the news and global economic debates since the financial crisis but the arguments tend to be based on relatively little empirical evidence measuring the costs of tax havens to foreign governments is fraught with difficulties however balance of payments data and corporate filings show that us companies are shifting profits to bermuda luxembourg and similar countries on a large and growing scale about 20 percent of all us corporate profits are now booked in such havens a tenfold increase since the 1980s this profit shifting is typically done within the letter of the law and thus would be best described as tax avoidance rather than fraud i attempt to quantify its cost for government coffers by taking a fresh look at the most recent macroeconomic evidence and combining it in a systematic manner over the last 15 years the effective corporate tax rate of us companies has declined from 30 to 20 percent and about two thirds of this decline can be attributed to increased profit shifting to low tax jurisdictions wealthy individuals too use tax havens sometimes legally to benefit from banking services not available in their home country and sometimes illegally to evade taxes a number of changes have sought with some success to curb that form of tax evasion over the last years yet the available evidence from switzerland and

the missing wealth of nations are europe and the u s net debtors or net creditors this paper shows that official statistics substantially underestimate the net foreign asset positions of rich countries because they fail to capture most of the assets held by households in offshore tax havens drawing on systematic anomalies in portfolio investment positions and a unique swiss dataset i find that 8 of the global financial wealth of households is held in tax havens 6 of which goes unrecorded on the basis of plausible assumptions accounting for unrecorded assets turns the eurozone officially the world s second largest net debtor into a net creditor it also reduces the u s net debt significantly the results shed new light on global imbalances and challenge the widespread view that after a decade of poor to rich capital flows external assets are now in poor countries and debts in rich countries i provide concrete proposals to improve international investment statistics

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

a theory of optimal inheritance taxation this paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that a capture the key equityeciency trade o b are expressed in terms of estimable sucient statistics c are robust to the underlying structure of preferences we consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous bequest tastes and labor productivities we limit ourselves to simple but realistic linear or two bracket tax structures to obtain tractable formulas we show that long run optimal inheritance tax rates can always be expressed in terms of distributional parameters aggregate behavioral elasticities and social preferences for redistribution importantly those results carry over with tractable modications to a the case with social discounting instead of steady state welfare maximization b the case with partly accidental bequests c the standard barro becker dynastic model in all cases the optimal inheritance tax rate increases with the concentration of bequest received and decreases with the elasticity of aggregate bequests to the net of tax rate the optimal tax rate is positive and quantitatively large if concentration is high the elasticity is low and society cares mostly about those receiving little inheritance in contrast the optimal tax rate is negative when society cares mostly about inheritors we propose a calibration using micro data for france and the united states we nd that for realistic parameters

bequest and tax planning evidence from estate tax returns i study bequest and wealth accumulation behavior of the wealthy subject to the estate tax shortly before death the onset of a terminal illness leads to a very significant reduction in the value of estates reported on tax returns fifteen to twenty percent with illness lasting months to years and about five to ten percent in the case of illness reported as lasting days to weeks i provide evidence suggesting that these findings cannot be explained by real shocks to net worth such as medical expenses or lost income but instead reflect deathbed estate planning the results suggest that wealthy individuals actively care about disposition of their estates but that this preference is dominated by the desire to hold on to their wealth while alive

do americans want to tax wealth evidence from online surveys abstract a vast theoretical literature in public finance has studied the desirability of capital taxation this discussion largely ignores the political feasibility of taxing wealth we provide to our knowledge the first investigation of individuals preferences over jointly taxing income and wealth we provide subjects with a set of hypothetical individuals incomes and wealth and elicit subjects preferred absolute tax bill for each individual our method allows us to unobtrusively map both income earned and accumulated wealth into desired tax levels our regression results yield roughly linear desired tax rates on income of about 14 respondents suggested tax rates indicate positive desired wealth taxation when we distinguish between sources of wealth we find that in line with recent theoretical arguments subjects implied tax rate on wealth is 3 when the source of wealth is inheritance far higher than the 0 8 rate when wealth is from savings textual analysis of respondents justifications for their tax rates imply limited concern for the elasticity of tax bases with respect to net of tax rates

capital taxation in the twenty first century in capital in the twenty first century thomas piketty presents a compelling story of the ascendency of capital and the powerlessness of the market forces of capitalism to arrest the growing threat to democracy from growing wealth and its increasing concentration in the hands of the few piketty prescribes a global coordinated wealth tax as the antidote to this dystopian trend arguing that only such a direct assault on wealth concentrations will succeed where the other policies of governments that already play large roles in their respective economies have failed

unemployment insurance and short time compensation the effects on layoffs hours per worker and wages we analyze two unemployment insurance systems in one unemployed workers receive benefits while those on reduced hours do not as in north america at least until recently in the other short time compensation is paid to workers on reduced hours as in europe the first system causes inefficient temporary layoffs for some parameters the latter does not but implies inefficient hours per worker some evidence is presented regarding these effects despite policymakers recent enthusiasm for short time compensation the clear implication of this project is that changes should come on the tax not benefit side of the system

the anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity abstract the increasing diversity of societies raises questions about the consequences for redistributive preferences this paper assesses the impact of social identity on distributional preferences in a modified dictator game i estimate individual level utility functions with two parameters that govern the trade offs between equity and efficiency and giving to self and to other subjects on average put less weight on income of the out group the out group treatment also changes the distribution of equity efficiency concerns however the experiment also uncovers a large individual heterogeneity of preferences an analysis of garp violations reveals that choices in both treatments overwhelmingly stem from well behaved yet systematically different underlying utility functions hence the evidence presented here suggests that the rational choice approach is a useful tool for understanding the effect of social identity on preferences

optimal firm size taxes and unemployment abstract we analyze a model similar to the standard implicit contracting framework but assume that the size of the firm the number of workers under contract is endogenous some well known predictions from contract theory with firm size fixed exogenously are reversed in particular a result obtained by feldstein concerning unemployment insurance does not hold when firm size is chosen optimally he concludes an increase in experience rating the extent to which firms pay for unemployment benefits through their taxes reduces unemployment while we show that it increases unemployment under reasonable conditions

what do we know about evolution of top wealth shares in the united states in piketty s 2014 prominent book capital in the twenty first century he argues that the concentration of wealth may become increasingly extreme in the future as piketty reminds us the group of rentiers people living off accumulated capital has been historically large and politically and socially influential because so much of large fortunes end up being inherited the current concentration of wealth is bound to predict at least weakly and perhaps strongly how important rentiers will be regardless of whether one buys into depictions such as the rentier enemy of democracy p 422 the extent to which the well off are going to rely on work versus rely on the returns to their wealth in the future is clearly important for assessing the extent to which a society will view itself as in some way a meritocracy given that the us economy has experienced rising inequality in its income and earning distributions for example piketty and saez 2003 or see the symposium on the top 1 percent in the summer 2013 issue of this journal one would expect that the distribution of wealth would follow a similar path however available evidence on this topic is much more scant and conflicting than that on income and earnings in fact when piketty 2014 reports direct estimates of wealth concentration for france the united kingdom sweden and the united states in chapter 10 of his book he finds as yet little evidence of dramatic increase in wealth concentration in any of these countries

inheritance and wealth inequality evidence from population registers we use new population wide register data on inheritances and wealth in sweden to estimate the causal impact of inheritances on wealth inequality we find that inheritances reduce relative wealth inequality e g the gini coefficient falls by 5 10 percent but that absolute dispersion increases examining different parts of the wealth distribution we find that the top decile s wealth share decreases substantially whereas the wealth share of the bottom half increases from a negative to a positive share in essence wealthier heirs inherit larger amounts but less wealthy heirs inherit more relative to their pre inheritance wealth we also find that post inheritance behavioral adjustments mitigate the equalizing effect of inheritances because less wealthy heirs consume larger shares of their inheritances moreover we find that the swedish inheritance tax reduced the equalizing inheritance effect but that the redistribution of tax revenues could reverse this result finally we show that inheritances increase wealth mobility

output work hours and employment in the short run of a labour managed firm in its pure form the organisation of a labour managed firm lmf differs radically from that of a profit maximising firm pmf lmfs are found not only in yugoslavia many forms of producers cooperatives and employee owned firms appear in capitalist economies e g jones and svejnar i982 the theory of the lmf is also relevant to the economics of trade unions profit sharing codetermination and internal labour markets this is because where worker participation exists elements of the economic forces prevalent in an lmf can influence management policies on wages employment and investment it follows that by studying the lmf in relation to the pmf we may be better able to grasp the workings of more realistic firm organisations in which both labour and management vie over the division of firm specific rents from this perspective on the theory of the firm we examine the short run behaviour of the competitive lmf and in particular the tendency for output supply employment demand and work hours to differ from the neoclassical norm traditionally the short run analysis of the lmf has focused on its employment response to output price changes the theorem due to ward i958 and vanek i970 holds that an increase in output price causes paradoxically a reduction in employment and output if the lmf maximises per capita remuneration more recent work in which the lmf maximises the member s expected utility over layoff probabilities and remuneration demonstrates that the lmf s response to a higher output price is essentially to increase both output and employment e g steinherr and thisse i979 bonin i98i and miyazaki and neary i983a the key to this result is that these authors distinguish actual workforce which is variable in the short run from lmf membership size which is variable in the long run but fixed in the short run the precise features of this lmf short run behaviour also depend on the nature of the lmf s bankruptcy constraint which is largely determined by the lmf s access to capital markets in this line of analysis however authors have effectively assumed that work hours are institutionally fixed but variability in work hours or effort intensity can also be an important factor in the lmf s response to output price changes because a change in the lmf s output price immediately affects the member worker s per capita some of the basic results of this paper were originally reported in sections 7 8 of our july 1979 mimeographed paper which was read at the second international conference on the economics of worker s self management istanbul june i980 and also in seminars at berkeley british columbia bell labs cornell hitotsubashi kyoto osaka tokyo and toronto in i979 i980 we thank j bonin and the participants of the above conference and seminars for comments on earlier versions in writing the present version we especially benefited from the comments of anonymous referees p evans and t macurdy we are responsible for any remaining errors omissions and ambiguities a detailed computational appendix for our theorems and examples is available on request

management versus ownership ii two fields in economics have developed without much interaction in the past the theory of the firm and mathematical economics the former has accumulated a wealth of thoughts observations on the firm activities without analytical scrutiny the latter has raised the standard of analytical rigor only within simple frameworks which do not fit the nature of the firm activities in the preceding paper ichiishi 1982 a mathematical model of a capitalistic economy was constructed and a rigorous analysis was given to the model this paper presents the economic interpretations implications of the formal study in ichiishi 1982 and shows how the gap between the two fields is bridged it is also intended to serve as a survey article

a simpler theory of optimal capital taxation abstract this paper develops a theory of optimal capital taxation that expresses optimal tax formulas in sufficient statistics we first consider a simple model with utility functions linear in consumption and featuring heterogeneous utility for wealth in this case there are no transitional dynamics the steady state is reached immediately and has finite elasticities of capital with respect to the net of tax rate this allows for a tractable optimal tax analysis with formulas expressed in terms of empirical elasticities and social preferences that can address many important policy questions these formulas can easily be taken to the data to simulate optimal taxes which we do using u s tax return data on labor and capital incomes second we show how these results can be extended to the case with concave utility for consumption the same types of formulas carry over by appropriately defining elasticities we show that one can recover all the results from the simpler model using a new and non standard steady state approach that respects individual preferences even with a fully general utility function

r d capital rate of return on r d investment and spillover of r d in japanese manufacturing industries the effect of r 50d on productivity growth in japanese manufacturing industries is examined using more accurate firm r 50d expenditure data than widely used data based on financial statements series of r 50d capital are constructed then rate of return on r 50d investment is estimated in addition the impact of other industries r 50d on the productivity growth of an industry is also estimated an attempt is made to determine the effect of electronics technology upon the productivity growth of other industries through the transaction of the intermediate electronics goods with improved quality and through the diffusion of the new technological knowledge discovered japanese technology trade 1977 1981 copyright 1989 by mit press

top incomes in the long run of history a recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid hence aggregate economic growth per capita and gini inequality indexes are sensitive to excluding or including top incomes we discuss the estimation methods and issues that arise when constructing top income share series including income definition and comparability over time and across countries tax avoidance and tax evasion we provide a summary of the key empirical findings most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the twentieth century in general due to shocks to top capital incomes during the wars and depression shocks top income shares do not recover in the immediate postwar decades however over the last thirty years top income shares have increased substantially in english speaking countries and in india and china but not in continental european countries or japan this increase is due in part to an unprecedented surge in top wage incomes as a result wage income comprises a larger fraction of top incomes than in the past finally we discuss the theoretical and empirical models that have been proposed to account for the facts and the main questions that remain open

layoff unemployment risk shifting and productivity this paper is concerned with the theory of implicit labor contracts the implications of introducing hours worked or effort as an argument both in workers utility functions in addition to the wage rate and in firms production functions in addition to the number of workers are considered it is shown that layoffs can occur at equilibrium in the absence of unemployment compensation and value of leisure but only because of the inclusion of this additional variable

women wealth and mobility using estate tax returns data we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy in the united states peaked in the late 1960s at nearly one half and then declined to one third we argue that this pattern reflects changes in the importance of dynastic wealth with the share of women proxying for inher ited wealth if so wealth mobility decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter such an interpretation is consistent with technological change driving long term trends in mobility and inequality as well as the recent divergence between top wealth and top income shares documented elsewhere jel d31 j16 j62 033 the extent of and changes in intergenerational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but are hard to measure in this paper we argue that the share of women among the wealthiest americans can be used as a proxy for the importance of inherited rela tive to self made wealth this approach assumes that women tend to inherit rather than make great fortunes if so a higher share of women among the wealthy would reflect a rise in inherited wealth at the top and thus lower wealth mobility conversely higher wealth mobility where self made wealth replaces inherited wealth would result in more men at the top of the wealth distribution judged by this proxy and corroborated by various data sources wealth mobility decreased in the period 1925 1969 and increased thereafter such a pattern is consistent with an important role for technological change in shaping the wealth distribution and can provide an explanation for why wealth concentra tion has remained stable despite increasing income concentration in the last three decades over the past century the share of women among the very wealthy followed an inverse u pattern peaking in the late 1960s according to estate tax returns in 1925 one quarter of the wealthiest 0 01 percent were women this fraction rose rapidly through world war ii wwii and then more slowly to peak in 1969 when women neared parity with men since then the decline has been marked by 2000 women s share had fallen to one third its prewar level while the rise was evident among all wealth groups in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution the decline was confined to the very top figure ia graphs the share of women for four different groups in the top 1 percent among decedents by year figure ib does the same for the living population with the help of estate multipliers a method that treats death as a random sampling device and uses mortality rates by age and gender to infer the distribution of wealth among the living as described in the data appendix while the rise in the share of women among the wealthy until the 1960s could reflect improve ments in women s economic status labor market gains work against the recent decline for instance since the 1970s the share of women among top earners top 0 1 percent has risen by

how progressive is the u s federal tax system a historical and international perspective this paper provides estimates of federal tax rates by income groups in the united states since 1960 with special emphasis on very top income groups we include individual and corporate income taxes payroll taxes and estate and gift taxes the progressivity of the u s federal tax system at the top of the income distribution has declined dramatically since the 1960s this dramatic drop in progressivity is due primarily to a drop in corporate taxes and in estate and gift taxes combined with a sharp change in the composition of top incomes away from capital income and toward labor income the sharp drop in statutory top marginal individual income tax rates has contributed only moderately to the decline in tax progressivity international comparisons confirm that is it critical to take into account other taxes than the individual income tax to properly assess the extent of overall tax progressivity both for time trends and for cross country comparisons the pattern for the united kingdom is similar to the u s pattern france had less progressive taxes than the united states or the united kingdom in 1970 but has experienced an increase in tax progressivity and has now a more progressive tax system than the united states or the united kingdom

thomas piketty and the rate of time preference using a standard model in which the individual consumption path is computed solving an optimal control problem we investigate central claims of piketty 2014 rather than r g confirmed in the data r g with being the rate of time preference matters if this condition holds and the elasticity of substitution in the production function is larger than one the capital share converges to one in the long run nevertheless this does not have major impact on the distribution of wealth the latter however converges to maximum inequality for heterogeneous time preferences or rates of interest either persistent or stochastic for the latter the presence of finite life times leads to a distribution with finite wealth inequality featuring fat tails

about capital in the twenty first century in this article i present three key facts about income and wealth inequality in the long run emerging from my book capital in the twenty first century and seek to sharpen and refocus the discussion about those trends in particular i clarify the role played by r g in my analysis of wealth inequality i also discuss some of the implications for optimal taxation and the relation between capital income ratios and capital shares

economic shocks and labor market flexibility we test how labor markets adjust to large but temporary economic shocks in a context in which such shocks are common using an individual level panel from 1 140 philippine municipalities over 26 quarters we find that workers in areas affected by strong typhoons experience reductions in hours worked and hourly wages without evidence of layoffs the results are strongest for formal wage paying jobs we argue that those results are best explained by implicit contracts where workers and firms share risks we provide extensive qualitative data suggesting that employment contracts in the philippines allow for such flexibility abstract from author

distributional national accounts methods and estimates for the united states this article 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 pretax and posttax income making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects inequality average pretax real national income per adult has increased 60 from 1980 to 2014 but we find that it has stagnated for the bottom 50 of the distribution at about 16 000 a year the pretax 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 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 but the share of women falls steeply as one moves up the labor income distribution and is only 11 in the top 0 1 in 2014

wealth inequality in the united states since 1913 evidence from capitalized income tax data this paper combines income tax returns with flow of funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the united states since 1913 we estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income we successfully test our capitalization method in three micro datasets where we can observe both income and wealth the survey of consumer finance linked estate and income tax returns and foundations tax records wealth concentration has followed a u shaped evolution over the last 100 years it was high in the beginning of the twentieth century fell from 1929 to 1978 and has continuously increased since then the rise of wealth inequality is almost entirely due to the rise of the top 0 1 wealth share from 7 in 1979 to 22 in 2012 a level almost as high as in 1929 the bottom 90 wealth share rst increased up to the mid 1980s and then steadily declined the increase in wealth concentration is due to the surge of top incomes combined with an increase in saving rate inequality top wealth holders are younger today than in the 1960s and earn a higher fraction of total labor income in the economy we explain how our ndings can be reconciled with survey of consumer finances and estate tax data

convergence in china s high tech industry development performance a spatial panel model abstractat present there exist both regional scale and regional performance differences in china s high tech industry development performance differences will inevitably affect resource allocation in regional high tech industry and in the upgrading of industrial structure thus this article conducts a systematic study of convergence issues in china s high tech industry development performance by adopting the spatial panel econometric method and related approaches first to measure the comprehensive performance of china s high tech industry development the study applies the malmquist index and efficacy coefficient method from the perspective of rd then by adopting a spatial autoregressive sar panel data model it studies the absolute convergence and convergence mechanism of china s provincial high tech industry development performance from 2001 to 2013 the results indicate the existence of distinct absolute convergence in china s high tech industry developme

household inequality entrepreneurial dynamism and corporate financing economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism to empirically investigate its impact we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents home equity and 1880 farmland we identify its effects on entrepreneurship by instrumenting it with land distribution under the 1862 homestead act or us states removal of death taxes wealth inequality decreases firm entry and exit and the proportion of high tech businesses across metropolitan statistical areas there is also less redistribution into public goods supportive of entrepreneurship such as schooling and the judiciary income per capita consequently grows more slowly

top wealth shares in the uk over more than a century abstract recent research highlighted controversy about the evolution of concentration of personal wealth in this paper we provide new evidence about the long run evolution of top wealth shares for the united kingdom the new series covers a long period from 1895 to the present and has a different point of departure from the previous literature we start with the analysis of the distribution of estates left at death we find that the application to the estate data of mortality multipliers to yield estimates of wealth among the living does not substantially change the degree of concentration over much of the period both in the uk and us allowing inferences to be made for years when this method cannot be applied the results show that wealth concentration in the uk remained relatively constant during the first wave of globalization but then decreased dramatically in the period from 1914 to 1979 the uk went from being more unequal in terms of wealth than the us to being less unequal however the decline in uk wealth concentration came to an end around 1980 and since then there is evidence of an increase in top shares notably in the distribution of wealth excluding housing in recent years we investigate the triangulating evidence provided by data on capital income concentration and on reported super fortunes

heterogeneity in returns to wealth and the measurement of wealth inequality lacking a long time series on the assets of the very wealthy saez and zucman 2015 use us tax records to obtain estimates of wealth holdings by capitalizing asset income from tax returns they document marked upward trends in wealth concentration we use data on tax returns and actual wealth holdings from tax records for the whole norwegian population to test the robustness of the methodology we document that measures of wealth based on the capitalization approach can lead to misleading conclusions about the level and the dynamics of wealth inequality if returns are heterogeneous and even moderately correlated with wealth

the theory of the labour managed firm revisited the voluntary interactive approach membership in the authors labor managed firm is determined in the long run by expected income maximization in the short run upon the realization of output price each member may leave the labor managed firm however a decision to leave when the entire membership quits is associated with fixed cost this arrangement ensures ex post egalitarianism and sense of job security the authors short run result is that employment does not exhibit a perverse response to price variations the long run result is that their labor managed firm is more populous than the illyrian firm and may even be more than its capitalistic twin copyright 1993 by royal economic society

simulating fundamental tax reform in the united states this paper uses a new large scale dynamic life cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of transitions to five fundamental alternatives to the u s federal income tax including a proportional consumption tax and a flat tax the model incorporates intragenerational heterogeneity and a detailed specification of alternative tax systems simulation results project significant long run increases in output for some reforms for other reforms namely those that seek to insulate the poor and initial older generations from adverse welfare changes long run output gains are modest