Research

Publications

(2026). Capital Taxation, Development, and Globalization: Evidence from a Macro-Historical Database (with Pierre Bachas, Anders Jensen, and Gabriel Zucman).  NBER Working Paper 29819. globaltaxation.world. Accepted at American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

This paper builds and analyzes a new global macro-historical database of effective tax rates on capital and labor in 154 countries. We establish a new stylized fact: while effective capital tax rates fell in developed countries between 1965 and 2018, they rose in developing countries since 1990. Multiple research designs at the country, sector and firm-level suggest that trade openness contributed to this rise, by increasing the share of output produced in corporations and larger firms, where effective capital taxation is higher. In contrast to a common view, globalization appears in many countries to have supported governments’ ability to tax capital. 

(2026). Inequality and Agricultural Structural Change. UNU-WIDER Working Paper 5/2025. UN Committee on World Food Security presentation. Accepted at Structural Change and Economic Dynamics (invited special issue: "Kuznets at 70").

Since 1950, agricultural productivity has been increasing even as laborers leave agriculture. However, while average productivity of the sector has been converging, within-sector inequality has been increasing. Agricultural income inequality is still less than overall income inequality, but it measures significantly higher when we use higher-quality and more comprehensive survey data. This means not only to observe the entirety of household farm income, but also to measure the magnitude of capital income and corporate profits in the sector. Given the likely increase in agricultural inequality during the process of structural change, I show also the extent to which social protection programs are both insufficient and poorly targeted for rural populations. 

(2025). Distributional National Accounts for Australia, 1991 - 2018 (with Nicolas Hérault and Roger Wilkins). Journal of Economic Inequality 23: 27-42 (2025).

We produce estimates of the full distribution of all national income in Australia for the period 1991 to 2018, by combining household survey with administrative tax microdata and making adjustments to match National Accounts aggregates. We find that inequality of post-tax national income is lower and increased less than inequality of survey-based (post-transfer, disposable) income between 1991 and 2018. International comparisons reveal that Australian inequality is much lower than that of the United States, while it is similar to that of France, with those at the bottom of the income distribution faring noticeably better in France and Australia than in the US. 

(2025). Income Inequality in Canada and Provinces, 1982 - 2021 (with Silas Xuereb, François Delorme and Camille Lajoie). Canadian Public Policy 51: 1-15 (2025).

In this article, we estimate the distribution of all net national income in Canada from 1982 to 2021. We find that income inequality in Canada increased significantly from 1982 until the mid-2000s. Although labour income drove initial growth in top shares, toward the end of this period capital income contributed most to growth in top shares. Top shares based on tax data were especially underestimated during this period because retained earnings were at their highest. Since the mid-2000s, top shares have decreased slightly and the income share of the bottom 50 percent has increased, although they have not returned to the levels observed in the early 1980s. During the pandemic, post-tax income inequality fell because of the large temporary transfer programs that were introduced. However, pre-tax income inequality increased in 2020, and even more so in 2021 when record levels of corporate profits were reached. 

Working Papers

(2026). Government Redistribution and Development: Global Estimates of Tax and Transfer Progressivity, 1980 - 2013 (with Amory Gethin). Revise & Resubmit, Quarterly Journal of Economics. World Inequality Lab Working Paper 2023/17. VoxEU CEPR.

This article constructs a new database on the distributional incidence of taxes and transfers in 151 countries from 1980 to 2023. We combine household surveys, national accounts, government budgets, tax simulators, and existing fiscal incidence studies to allocate the entirety of tax revenue and public expenditure to individuals. We establish five main findings. First, tax-and-transfer systems reduce inequality in all countries, but with large variations. Second, transfers accounts for 90% of this reduction in inequality, while taxes account for only 10%. Third, redistribution rises with development, but this is entirely due to transfers; tax progressivity is uncorrelated with per-capita income. Fourth, there has been no cross-country convergence in redistribution: fiscal progressivity has increased in Western Europe and the Anglosphere while it has stagnated in Africa. Fifth, differences in pretax inequality (“predistribution”) account for 80% of variations in posttax inequality, while differences in tax-and-transfer systems (“redistribution”) account for 20%.

(2026). National Service and the Great Leveling: New Evidence on Midcentury American Inequality. World Inequality Lab Working Paper. [slides]

This paper extends US distributional national accounts and explains midcentury wage compression with a natural experiment. New estimates from archival tax and survey data show that the relative gains of the New Deal era were more durable for the upper middle class than for the poorest — except in wages, where bottom-50% compression was sharp and lasting. To explain this, I link the 1940 and 1950 full-count Censuses to WWII enlistment records and exploit a discontinuity in draft eligibility: fathers before Pearl Harbor were largely exempt from service. The causal wage premium from service was strongest for working-class men.

(2025). Equality and Development: A Comparative and Historical Perspective, 1800-2025 (with Thomas Piketty et al). World Inequality Lab Working Paper 2025/25.

This paper uses extended series on income and wealth inequality from the World Inequality Database (WID) covering all world regions over the 1800-2025 period, together with new series on hourly productivity and human capital expenditure, to revisit the relationship between equality and development, with a much broader comparative and historical perspective than previous studies. Over the long-run, we find a strong positive association between equality and productivity. Our proposed interpretation is that the rise of inclusive “social-democratic” institutions (including extended access to human capital, public services and democratic participation) led both to more equality and higher productivity, particularly in Western and Nordic Europe. We discuss the implications for future sustainable development strategies.