Business Incomes at the Top

Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick ()
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Eric Zwick: University of Chicago - Booth School of Business

No 2020-118, Working Papers from Becker Friedman Institute for Research In Economics

Abstract: Business income constitutes a large and increasing share of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. We discuss how tax policy treats and shapes how businesses are organized and how they distribute economic gains to owners, with the focus on closely-held and pass-through firms. These considerations influence whether and how labor and capital income is observed in economic data and feed into research controversies regarding the measurement of inequality and the progressivity of the tax code. We discuss the importance of these issues in the US, and highlight that limited evidence from other countries suggests that they are likely to be important elsewhere.

JEL-codes: D31 D33 E25 H24 H25 H32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

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https://repec.bfi.uchicago.edu/RePEc/pdfs/BFI_WP_2020118.pdf (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Business Incomes at the Top (2020)
Working Paper: Business Incomes at the Top (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfi:wpaper:2020-118

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