Income Inequality in the United States in the Late 1860s

摘要

I utilize data from the Civil War income tax to calculate the income shares of the top 1 and 0.1 percent of the population in the United States in the late 1860sextending Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez's series back in time. As we will see, income inequality during this period represents a low comparable to the late 1970s.