Extreme Wage Inequality: Pay at the Very Top

摘要

It is well known that the United States, United Kingdom, and many advanced economies have witnessed a sharp rise in wage and income inequality since the end of the 1970s. Much of the evidence on this phenomenon has focused on the evolution of wages between different points in the wage distribution—e.g., the ninetieth-tenth percentile log(wage) differential. More recently, Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) have emphasized how this evidence misses a significant part of the story, namely the remarkable rise in the share of income and wages taken by those toward the extreme of the distribution (such as the top 1 percent or 0.1 percent).