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Title: Firming Up Inequality

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2017

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Abstract: From overpaid corporate executives to job-thieving technology, past research has pointed to a number of different culprits behind the rise in income inequality. But University of Minnesota economist Fatih Guvenen, along with four other researchers, has unveiled a fresh perspective, one they believe deserves a closer look. Their recent research finds much of U.S. income inequality can be explained in the mundane arena of company organization charts. That is, the way firms shape and reshape the way they do business. The conclusions are drawn from a staggering amount of government data, assembled and analyzed for the first time across a vast stretch of time. The study, the first of its kind, required gathering payroll and employment records of an average of 70 million workers at more than five million firms from 1981 through 2013. The job involved matching Social Security records with Employer Identification Numbers in a compilation that would strain, if not break, standards spreadsheets.

Url: https://cla.umn.edu/sites/cla.umn.edu/files/firming_up_inequality.pdf

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Authors: Guvenen, Fatih

Publisher: University of Minnesota

Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Poverty and Welfare

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