Paper · 2003 · intermediate level
Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998
Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez
- Venue
- Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 1–39
- DOI
- 10.1162/00335530360535135
- Link
- publisher / source page
~3,471 citations
Source: Semantic Scholar API (corpus ID 154860564) · verified 2026-07-20. Counts drift daily and differ by database; treat as a dated snapshot.
In plain language
Used U.S. tax records back to 1913 to show top income shares fell sharply from the Depression through WWII, then climbed steadily back up starting around 1980.
Technical summary
Built the first long-run, high-frequency U.S. top-income-share series from individual tax-return data, revealing a U-shaped pattern and attributing the mid-century decline partly to permanent capital-income shocks under progressive taxation.
Key takeaways
- Created the modern 'top incomes' subfield using tax data instead of survey data, which undersamples the rich.
- Empirical backbone for most subsequent U.S. inequality research, including Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Themes
Related works
- Top Incomes in the Long Run of History — Anthony B. Atkinson et al., 2011
- Capital in the Twenty-First Century — Thomas Piketty, 2014