Wojciech Kopczuk
Biographic Data
| ID | 1100167 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wojciech Kopczuk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wojciech |
| FAMILY NAME | Kopczuk |
| SIGNATURE | KOPCZUK W |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8678-275X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Measuring Income and Income Inequality
Income inequality is important, but attempts to measure it arrive at strikingly different conclusions. Why? We use recent disputes over measuring United States income inequality to return to first principles about both the income concept and inequality measurement. We emphasize two broad points. First, no measure of the income distribution is truly comprehensive, or could attempt to be comprehensive without making controversial choices. We docume…
Business Incomes at the Top
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 measuremen…
Born with a Silver Spoon? Danish Evidence on Wealth Inequality in Childhood
We use Danish wealth records from three decades to characterise wealth inequality in childhood, where the main source of wealth is transfers. Wealth holdings are small in childhood but they have strong predictive power for future wealth in adulthood. At age 18, asset holdings of children are more informative than parental wealth in predicting wealth of children when they are in their 40s. We investigate why and rule out that childhood wealth in i…
What Do We Know about the Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States
I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the course of the 20th century. The three main approaches-the Survey of Consumer Finances, estate tax multiplier, and capitalization methods-generate generally consistent findings until mid-1980s but diverge since then, with the capitalization method showing a dramatic increase in wealth concentration and the other two methods showing at best a small i…
Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data since 1937
This paper uses Social Security Administration longitudinal earnings micro data since 1937 to analyze the evolution of inequality and mobility in the United States. Annual earnings inequality is U-shaped, decreasing sharply up to 1953 and increasing steadily afterward. Short-term earnings mobility measures are stable over the full period except for a temporary surge during World War II. Virtually all of the increase in the variance in annual (log…
Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate-Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity
This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate-tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could significantly affect estate-tax liability. We find some evidence that there is a small death elasticity, although we cannot rule out that what we have uncovered i…
The Trick Is to Live: Is the Estate Tax Social Security for the Rich
Because estate tax liability usually depends on how long one lives, it implicitly provides annuity income. In the absence of annuity markets, lump-sum estate taxation may be used to achieve the first-best solution for individuals with a sufficiently strong bequest motive. Calculations of the annuity embedded in the U.S. estate tax show that people with $10 million of assets may be effectively receiving more than $100,000 a year financed at actuar…
Born with a Silver Spoon? Danish Evidence on Wealth Inequality in Childhood
We use Danish wealth records from three decades to characterise wealth inequality in childhood, where the main source of wealth is transfers. Wealth holdings are small in childhood but they have strong predictive power for future wealth in adulthood. At age 18, asset holdings of children are more informative than parental wealth in predicting wealth of children when they are in their 40s. We investigate why and rule out that childhood wealth in i…
What Do We Know about the Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States
I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the course of the 20th century. The three main approaches-the Survey of Consumer Finances, estate tax multiplier, and capitalization methods-generate generally consistent findings until mid-1980s but diverge since then, with the capitalization method showing a dramatic increase in wealth concentration and the other two methods showing at best a small i…
Business Incomes at the Top
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 measuremen…
Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate-Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity
This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate-tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could significantly affect estate-tax liability. We find some evidence that there is a small death elasticity, although we cannot rule out that what we have uncovered i…
The Trick Is to Live: Is the Estate Tax Social Security for the Rich
Because estate tax liability usually depends on how long one lives, it implicitly provides annuity income. In the absence of annuity markets, lump-sum estate taxation may be used to achieve the first-best solution for individuals with a sufficiently strong bequest motive. Calculations of the annuity embedded in the U.S. estate tax show that people with $10 million of assets may be effectively receiving more than $100,000 a year financed at actuar…
Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data since 1937
This paper uses Social Security Administration longitudinal earnings micro data since 1937 to analyze the evolution of inequality and mobility in the United States. Annual earnings inequality is U-shaped, decreasing sharply up to 1953 and increasing steadily afterward. Short-term earnings mobility measures are stable over the full period except for a temporary surge during World War II. Virtually all of the increase in the variance in annual (log…
What Do We Know about the Evolution of Top Wealth Shares in the United States
I discuss available evidence about the evolution of top wealth shares in the United States over the course of the 20th century. The three main approaches-the Survey of Consumer Finances, estate tax multiplier, and capitalization methods-generate generally consistent findings until mid-1980s but diverge since then, with the capitalization method showing a dramatic increase in wealth concentration and the other two methods showing at best a small i…
Born with a Silver Spoon? Danish Evidence on Wealth Inequality in Childhood
We use Danish wealth records from three decades to characterise wealth inequality in childhood, where the main source of wealth is transfers. Wealth holdings are small in childhood but they have strong predictive power for future wealth in adulthood. At age 18, asset holdings of children are more informative than parental wealth in predicting wealth of children when they are in their 40s. We investigate why and rule out that childhood wealth in i…
Business Incomes at the Top
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 measuremen…
Measuring Income and Income Inequality
Income inequality is important, but attempts to measure it arrive at strikingly different conclusions. Why? We use recent disputes over measuring United States income inequality to return to first principles about both the income concept and inequality measurement. We emphasize two broad points. First, no measure of the income distribution is truly comprehensive, or could attempt to be comprehensive without making controversial choices. We docume…
Economics (7 works) · Labour economics (5 works) · Finance (4 works) · Finance (4 works) · Inequality (4 works) · Monetary economics (4 works) · Public economics (4 works) · Tax reform (4 works) · Demographic economics (3 works) · Estate (3 works)