Business Incomes at the Top

Wojciech Kopczuk and Eric Zwick

No 27752, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

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)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pbe
Note: CF PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Published as Wojciech Kopczuk & Eric Zwick, 2020. "Business Incomes at the Top," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol 34(4), pages 27-51.

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