 Do Piketty and Saez Misstate Income Inequality? Critiquing the CritiquesGeorge Mechling, Stephen Miller and Ron Konecny Review of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 29, issue 1, 30-46 Abstract: A large body of literature points to sharply growing income inequality over the past half century. The Piketty and Saez dataset that measures income distribution provides empirical support for this claim. Our article evaluates three prominent criticisms of this dataset as well as the responses of Piketty and Saez to these criticisms. One key argument against using their dataset is that Piketty and Saez do not control for income shifting by top income earners in response to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) and thus overstate income inequality. In evaluating this criticism we find that a segment of their dataset likely understates income inequality; this is just the opposite of what critics assert. This implies that the Piketty–Saez dataset is a valuable resource for income inequality research and that scholars can use it to build more refined, accurate and insightful measures of income inequality. Date: 2017 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:revpoe:v:29:y:2017:i:1:p:30-46 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2017.1255439 Access Statistics for this article Review of Political Economy is currently edited by Steve Pressman and Louis-Philippe Rochon More articles in Review of Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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