Top Incomes : A Global Perspective

This volume brings together an exciting range of new studies of top incomes in a wide range of countries from around the world. The studies use data from income tax records to cast light on the dramatic changes that have taken place at the top of the income distribution. The results cover 22 countries and have a long time span, going back to 1875.

Sir Tony Atkinson is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Nuffield College, of which he was Warden from 1994 to 2005. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been President of the Royal Economic Society, of the Econometric Society, of the European Economic Association, and of the International Economic Association. He was responsible for the Atkinson Review of Measurement of Government Output. He has been a member of the Conseil d'Analyse Economique, advising the French Prime Minister. He was knighted on 2001 for services to economics, and is a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur. He is author of Unequal Shares, The Economics of Inequality, Lectures on Public Economics (with J.E. Stiglitz), Poverty and Social Security, Public Economics in Action, The Economic Consequences of Rolling Back the Welfare State, Social Indicators and The EU and Social Inclusion (both with B Cantillon, E Marlier and B Nolan), and The Changing Distribution of Earnings in OECD Countries.

Thomas Piketty is a New York Times best-selling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard University Press), and a Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics, of which he was the founder and first director from 2005 to 2007. He obtained his PhD in economics from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris) and the London School of Economics in 1993. He then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Economics Department, before returning to France in 1996. He is the author of numerous articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Review of Economic Studies, and of several books. He received Le Monde's Best Young Economist Award in 2002. He is also the co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and co-director of CEPR's Public Policy Programme.