IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/suqnk_v1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Growth of US Top Income Inequality: A Hierarchical Redistribution Hypothesis

Author

Listed:
  • Fix, Blair

    (York University)

Abstract

What accounts for the growth of US top income inequality? This paper proposes a hierarchical redistribution hypothesis. The idea is that US firms have systematically redistributed income to the top of the corporate hierarchy. I test this hypothesis using a large-scale hierarchy model of the US private sector. My method is to vary the rate that income scales with hierarchical rank within modeled firms. I find that this model is able to reproduce four intercorrelated US trends: (1) the growth of the top 1% income share; (2) the growth of the CEO pay ratio; (3) the growth of the dividends share of national income; and (4) the ‘fattening’ of the entire income distribution tail. This result supports the hierarchical redistribution hypothesis. It is also consistent with the available empirical evidence on within-firm income redistribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Fix, Blair, 2018. "The Growth of US Top Income Inequality: A Hierarchical Redistribution Hypothesis," SocArXiv suqnk_v1, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:suqnk_v1
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/suqnk_v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/5b55f4c2c86a8c001045045d/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/suqnk_v1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:suqnk_v1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.