Thread by @BrankoMilan

A bit, I hope, of relevant background to @MarcoRanaldi_ and @BrankoMilan paper that we just posted today and that looks at various capitalist systems and their inequality.
lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/803…

It is an area of research that would grow now that we have the methodology, the data, and interest to compare various countries/systems.

This background info is from my perspective. Marco might have a bit of a different one.

@PikettyLeMonde has emphasized in C21C the importance of the rising K share in driving income inequality.
The impact of that rising (macro) share obviously depends on how K income is distributed. If K income is distributed like L income, rising K share has no effect on Gini.

Historically K income has been heavily concentrated among the rich though.
I explored these different possibilities in a paper done for "After Piketty" edited by @HBoushey, @delong and @Econ_Marshall.
Here is the paper:
stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/files/2017/05/…
I expanded this in "C,A".

Marco was interested in the same issue: discussed it in his PhD dissertation defended at PSE. He developed a whole set of tools to explore "compositional inequality" and to thus link functional to inter-personal distribution.
Here is Marco's paper:
osf.io/preprints/soca…

This link between the two was an issue that concerned many, incl. Tony Atkinson.
E.g when I wrote my paper I did not have a synthetic (single) measure of compositional ineq.
Marco "invented" that based on Gini-type approach (=> shows versatility of Gini; h/t to Shlomo Yitzaki)

It is thus a significant methodological advance.
Marco has several other papers at various stages of (pre) publication.
The area will keep on growing. Other people will join and contribute.