Economic and Social History : Publications

Drawing on a comprehensive compilation of quantile shares and inequality measures for 34 countries, including over 5,600 estimated Gini coefficients, we review the measurement of income inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean over the last seven decades. We find that there is quite a bit of uncertainty regarding inequality levels for the same country/year combinations. Differences in inequality levels estimated from household surveys alone are present but they derive from differences in the construction of the welfare indicator, the unit of analysis, or the treatment of the data. With harmonized household surveys, the discrepancies are quite small. The range, however, expands significantly when to correct for undercoverage and underreporting especially at the top of the distribution inequality estimates come from some combination of surveys and administrative tax data. The range increases even further when survey-based income aggregates are scaled to achieve consistency not only with tax registries but with National Accounts. Since no single method to correct for underreporting at the top is fully convincing at present, we are left with (often wide) ranges, or bands, of inequality as our best summaries of inequality levels. Reassuringly, however, the dynamic patterns are generally robust across the bands. Although the evidence roughly until the 1970s is too fragmentary and difficult to compare, clearer patterns emerge for the last fifty years. The main feature is a broad inverted U curve, with inequality rising in most countries prior to and often during the 1990s, and falling during the early 21st century, at least until around 2015, when trends appear to diverge across countries. This pattern is broadly robust but features considerable variation in timing and magnitude depending on the country.

Establishing a Ukrainian Development Bank is key to Ukraine’s post-war recovery, to foster both international trust and local ownership. This column describes how, drawing on lessons from the European national development banks and Ukraine’s recent reforms, a Ukrainian Development Bank could integrate existing financial structures, channel EU aid, support small and medium-sized enterprises, and drive economic modernisation. Balancing local ownership with robust governance and civil oversight to mitigate corruption risks will be crucial to ensure effective integration into the EU and sustainable development.

We emphasize an important point in the transformation of sources into data that affects economists and historians alike in every era: the theoretical framework they share. On a broad scale, three major moments can be distinguished during the twentieth century in terms of the general conceptual framework for economic data, which we shall call the price era, the quantity era and the individual era. In the first, economic activity is observed primarily through prices, which is justified by the preponderance of price theory. In the second, the organized measurement of quantities is produced by national accounting systems within the framework of Keynesian macroeconomic theory, and then of growth theory. Criticism of these earlier frameworks is now leading to experimentation with a very large number of measures, characterized by the sheer volume of information analyzed, greater vagueness between sources and data, and a multiplicity of conceptual frameworks. While each of these three stages represents a break with the previous ones, they nonetheless retain much of what has already been achieved.

The reforms of the Paris Stock Exchange between 1893 and 1898 gave rise to manifestations of antisemitism that were very much of their time. Supporters of the stockbrokers’ monopoly branded their opponents who participated in the free market (known as coulissiers ) as Jews. Beyond the conservative defense of a privileged guild and its liberal contestation, this episode illuminates two conceptions of the financial market that are still current today. The coulissiers favored liquidity and speed of execution, professional financiers, and international exchanges, potentially at the cost of trading security and equality, and to the detriment of small traders and market stability. The official brokers ( agents de change ) had opposite priorities. The debate was complexified by the emergence of a third, socialist position that rejected both liberal and conservative visions, proposing a public-service stock exchange that would favor transparency and security without benefiting a privileged group. Although this position did not win out, it nevertheless heralded new conceptions of the market economy.

In this unique work, Thomas Piketty presents a synthesis of his historical and comparative research on inequality. He challenges the idea that there could be natural inequalities and shows that the march toward equality has always depended on political and social struggles, addressing diverse topics such as: education, inheritance, the climate crisis, the taxation of wealth, and gender disparities. Adapted from Piketty’s 2022 lecture at the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Nature, Culture, and Inequality makes his important argument available to a wider audience for the first time. With a clear, conversational tone, he provides a strong foundation of data and concrete examples of how we can continue to level the playing field.

“Le XXe siècle a été le siècle de la social-démocratie. Le XXIe siècle sera celui du socialisme écologique, démocratique et participatif. L’affirmation peut surprendre en ces temps où un inquiétant mélange de repli identitaire et de néolibéralisme résigné semble l’emporter un peu partout. Et pourtant je reste optimiste, encore et toujours. L’égalité est un combat qui peut être gagné, qui a été gagné dans le passé et qui le sera encore à l’avenir. À condition de bien mesurer toutes les transformations institutionnelles que cela implique, de tirer toutes les leçons des stratégies politiques qui en découlent, et surtout de ne jamais abandonner à d’autres les questions sociales et économiques et les réflexions sur le système socioéconomique alternatif. Ce sont des questions éminemment politiques, sur lesquelles tous les citoyens se doivent d’avoir une opinion et de s’engager. C’est en renversant les rapports de savoir et de pouvoir et en reprenant le cours des mobilisations sociales et collectives que la marche vers l’égalité et la dignité pourra reprendre ses droits et que la parenthèse nationale-libérale pourra être refermée.” T.P Après Vivement le socialisme ! Chroniques 2016-2020,Thomas Piketty partage ses réflexions développées dans ses chroniques pour Le Monde et son blog, de la crise du Covid jusqu’à la guerre à Gaza. Il analyse les événements politiques qui secouent la planète, bousculent l’Europe et l’espace national, ouvrant des perspectives de changement. Précédé d’une préface inédite, ce recueil comprend l’ensemble des chroniques publiées par Thomas Piketty entre juillet 2020 et septembre 2024.

Un pacte budgétaire et fiscal européen face aux crises

Advanced-economy central banks are currently experiencing losses. To examine how rate-tightening cycles affect central bank finances, we study the financial statements of ten advanced-economy central banks during the 1970s and 1980s, the most notable and comparable policy environment to the present. We find that central bank profits actually increased in response to the anti-inflationary measures of the 1980s. We thus discuss how central bank profits depend on their policy instruments as well as their balance-sheet position when rate tightening begins, rather than on the tightening per se. Unlike today, central banks in the 1980s avoided losses because they did not remunerate bank reserves and their balance sheets did not carry the legacy of a decade of large asset purchases at low interest rates and long maturity. Our counterfactuals show that only a combination of these factors could have triggered losses in the 1980s: none of them is sufficient on its own. When losses emerged in the late 1970s, before the Volcker shock, they were due to foreign exchange reserves depreciating. In these instances, when central banks carried them forward and did not rely on transfers from the government, there was no loss of central bank independence or their ability to fight inflation.

It is widely assumed that the renminbi (RMB) cannot acquire a meaningful place in central bank reserve portfolios without full liberalization of China’s capital account. We argue that the RMB can in fact develop into an international reserve currency in the absence of capital‐account convertibility. Trade and investment links can drive use despite limited access to Chinese financial markets. But this route to currency internationalization requires policy support. China must provide access to RMB through loans and the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) currency swaps. It must ensure the convertibility of RMB into US dollars in offshore markets. It must provide RMB services at a stable and predictable price. Currency internationalization without full capital‐account liberalization thus requires the RMB to be backed by dollar reserves, which the PBoC consequently will continue to hold and use. Hence, we do not foresee RMB internationalization as supplanting dollar dominance.

New data covering 23 countries reveal that banking crises of the Great Depression coincided with a sharp international increase in deposits at savings institutions and life insurance. Deposits fled from commercial banks to alternative forms of savings. This fueled a credit crunch since other institutions did not replace bank lending. While asset prices fell, savings held in savings institutions and life insurance companies increased as a share of GDP and in real terms. These findings provide new explanations for the fall in credit and aggregate demand in the 1930s. They illustrate the need to consider nonbank financial institutions when studying banking crises.

Je tiens ici à remercier Frederick Cooper, Christelle Dumas et David Todd d’avoir consacré du temps à lire et commenter mon livre, et suis honoré qu’ils lui aient trouvé quelques qualités. Même si le nombre d’années et l’effort dédiés à un travail n’offrent aucune garantie de valeur, ce livre est le produit d’une recherche de longue haleine s’étalant sur près de vingt ans. Ce travail de longue durée a été rendu possible grâce au système de recherche publique français et a impliqué une petite équipe de collègues et co-auteurs – en particulier Yannick Dupraz et Sandrine Mesplé-Somps – à qui je souhaite une nouvelle fois rendre hommage. Si ce livre améliore, comme je l’espère, notre connaissance collective de l’histoire de la colonisation française, il ne constitue qu’une étape. Il soulève ainsi de nouvelles questions, et je rejoins mes trois commentateurs dans leur souhait que d’autres travaux, en France et ailleurs, s’attaquent à celles-ci. Plutôt que de m’adresser tour à tour à mes trois collègues, j’ai pensé utile de revenir sur les thèmes qu’ils ont abordés, regroupés en quatre sections : conquête et contrôle militaire ; peuplement et institutions ; exploitation et non-développement ; décolonisations. Avant cela, je me permets toutefois quelques remarques méthodologiques. Je suis heureux qu’à la fois un historien des empires, une économiste du développement ainsi qu’un historien de la mondialisation et de l’inscription internationale de la France saluent l’approche comparatiste que j’ai adoptée entre colonies, entre empires et entre périodes

We study how central banks have used their balance sheet to absorb international monetary shocks since the late 19th century, thereby regaining some monetary policy autonomy in a context of financial openness. If the uncovered interest rate parity does not hold, an increase in the leading international interest rate may push up domestic interest rates in both fixed and floating exchange rate regimes. Central banks can partially insulate domestic short-term interest rates from this increase by expanding domestic assets. With a fixed exchange rate, this is in addition to the sterilization of foreign exchange interventions. Accounting for the response of central bank balance sheets to an exogenous international shock sheds light on some puzzling behavior of interest rates and exchange rates across international monetary regimes in history. This study is based on a new monthly dataset of central bank balance sheets, macroeconomic, and financial variables for 23 countries since 1891.

How much did France pay for its colonial empire? Did colonies benefit from large transfers from French taxpayers and private investors, or were they on the contrary drained of their capital? So far, Jacques Marseille (1984) was the only attempt to investigate these questions, by deducting from the structural trade deficit of the French colonies that they were a heavy financial burden for France. We collect novel budgetary and loan data from archives and compute public monetary flows between France and the colonies between 1833 and 1962. We also provide figures of colonial private investment through the Paris Stock Exchange. Public expenditure spent by France on the empire only represented 1.3% of its GDP, of which four fifths were in the military. The persistent trade balance deficits of French colonies did not correspond to large public or private capital transfers, as they were in fact counterbalanced by military expenditure from the Metropole. Once accounting for this, the colonial drain of the French empire is comparable to British India.

Using newly collected data at the city level between 1910 and 1938, this article shows that, after World War I, France experienced an unprecedented expansion in bank branches mostly due to the creation of temporary branches in rural areas. The banking crisis in early 1930s paused this expansion. Nevertheless, the number of bank branches per capita remained four times higher than before the war. Also, the expansion of bank branches was not associated with an increase in the ratio of bank assets to national income. These findings re-evaluate the Great Reversal hypothesis in banking and reveal the disconnection between geographical expansion of banks and standard measures of financial development. Both trends can be reconciled if one considers that banks are multi-product firms-not just lenders-and that competition for new customers is not always associated with greater credit activity.

I provide comments and replies to the seven insightful contributions that discussed “The Democratic Challenge of Central Bank Credit Policies” and the proposal for a European Credit Council. I review how interdisciplinary scholarship on the political economy of central banking have shown the limits of simple principal-agent framework applied to central bank power and legitimacy. I emphasize why a change to central bank independence is not necessary for a fundamental change in the financial system and credit policies. I also argue that deliberations can have strong effects on decision-making and that the power of the people is not restricted to the legislative power.

Italy is one the countries with the highest wealth-to-income ratio in the developed world, but knowledge about the size distribution of wealth is currently limited. In this paper we estimate the distribution of personal wealth between 1995 and 2016, a period of economic turbulence and structural reforms. For this, we use a novel source on the full records of inheritance tax files, combined with surveys and national accounts. Unlike available statistics from household surveys alone, our estimates point to a sharp inversion of fortunes between the top and the bottom of the wealth distribution since the mid-1990s. Whereas the level of wealth concentration in Italy is in line with other European countries, its time trend appears more in line with the U.S., showing a large increase. Moreover, Italy stands out as one of the countries with the strongest decline in the wealth share of the bottom 50% of the population. A range of alternative series of wealth concentration, including estimates applying no adjustments and imputations, confirm our main findings. The paper also sheds new light on the determinants of wealth inequality trends. First, we show that although average wealth increases with age, dispersion within age groups remains very high; hence age plays a marginal role in explaining wealth concentration. Second, we show that house prices explain little of the change in wealth across the distribution since 1995. Changes in equity prices account for a large share of wealth growth above the 99th percentile. However, all in all, changes in the volume of assets and savings appear to be the predominant force behind the increase in wealth inequality, even at the top. The probability of top earners to climb to the top of the wealth distribution has doubled since the 2000s. Third, we document the growing role of life-time wealth transfers receipts, their increasing concentration at the top, and their increasingly favourable tax treatment for the wealthy.

We construct series of posttax income for France over the 1900–2018 period and compare them with US series. We quantify the extent of redistribution—the reduction from pretax to posttax inequality—and estimate the contribution of redistribution in explaining differences in posttax inequality. We find that differences in pretax inequality drive most of the differences in posttax inequality between France and the United States, and that changes over time in both countries are mostly due to changes in pretax inequality. We highlight that the concept of redistribution can be empirically misleading for judging how policies reduce inequalities.

Dans cette conférence inédite, Thomas Piketty présente une synthèse de ses recherches historiques et comparatives sur les inégalités. Abordant des thèmes aussi variés que l’éducation, l’héritage, la crise climatique, la taxation des richesses ou les inégalités de genre, il bat en brèche l’idée qu’il pourrait exister des inégalités naturelles et montre que la marche vers l’égalité se construit toujours par des luttes politique et sociales.

Au XIXe siècle, la France s’est lancée dans la colonisation de pays entiers en Afrique et en Asie. Quelles ont été les motivations et les méthodes de cette politique ? Comment les sociétés dominées ont-elles été bouleversées, et quel développement économique et social ont-elles connu ? La décolonisation est-elle achevée aujourd’hui ? Un Empire bon marché propose de nouvelles réponses à ces questions controversées. Grâce à un long travail d’archives et d’analyse statistique, l’ouvrage décrit ainsi avec une grande précision les États coloniaux et leur fonctionnement – à travers notamment la fiscalité, le recrutement militaire, les flux de capitaux et les inégalités. Il montre que l’empire a peu coûté à la métropole jusqu’aux guerres d’indépendance, et que les capitaux français n’ont pas ruisselé vers les colonies. La “mission civilisatrice” que la République française s’était assignée n’a donc pas débouché sur le développement des pays occupés, et c’est plutôt un régime à la fois violent et ambigu qui s’y est établi. De fait, le régime colonial a surtout bénéficié à une petite minorité de colons et de capitalistes français. Quant aux élites nationalistes, elles ont le plus souvent reconduit un État autoritaire et inégalitaire après les indépendances. En s’attachant à l’évolution des sociétés colonisées et à leur devenir, Denis Cogneau fournit une contribution majeure et un nouvel éclairage sur l’impérialisme, d’hier à aujourd’hui.

History suggests a conflict between current Basel III liquidity ratios and monetary policy, which we call the liquidity regulation dilemma. Although forgotten, liquidity ratios, named “securities-reserve requirements,” were widely used historically, but for monetary policy (not regulatory) reasons, as central bankers recognized the contractionary effects of these ratios. We build a model rationalizing historical policies: a tighter ratio reduces the quantity of assets that banks can pledge as collateral, thus increasing interest rates. Tighter liquidity regulation paradoxically increases the need for central bank’s interventions. Liquidity ratios were also used to keep yields on government bonds low when monetary policy tightened.

This article provides a framework for understanding the economic role of central banks and their democratic legitimacy. I argue that thinking about the democratic challenges of central banking requires considering central banks’ insurance role and how their actions are part of credit policy . The contract between the central bank and the sovereign is incomplete because it cannot integrate all unforeseen contingencies, distributive consequences and interactions with other policies. This opens the door to viewing the legitimacy of central bank decisions through a process of deliberation, coordination and reflexivity, rather than only a delegation of power. I discuss a proposal for a European Credit Council, which would be a deliberative body aimed at strengthening Parliamentary power on monetary and credit policies, the democratic legitimacy of central bank policy in the Euro Area as well as its coordination with other European policies. More coordination, Parliamentary power and deliberation are consistent with central bank independence and aim to delimit more precisely the action of central banks within the macroeconomic and credit policies of the State.

We study two regulatory changes that affected competition between the transparent Parquet and the OTC-like Coulisse markets in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The two reforms determined three regimes of competition—illegal competition, free competition, and enforced monopoly. After documenting institutional changes and their political economy, we show that the Paris market touch (i.e., the average spread of securities traded in the two markets) widened under the free competition regime but narrowed under the enforced monopoly regime to a size much smaller than during the first. These results accord with recent literature that questions the effects of competition between transparent and opaque markets; a transparent monopoly might be more effective than competition if the latter involves opaque markets.

This article estimates the evolution of income inequality in Africa from 1990 to 2019 by combining surveys, tax data, and national accounts. Inequality in Africa is very high: the regional top 10% income share nears 55%, on par with regions characterized by extreme inequality, such as Latin America and India. Most of continent-wide income inequality comes from the within-country component rather than from average income differences between countries. Inequality is highest in Southern Africa and lowest in Northern and Western Africa. It remained fairly stable from 1990 to 2019, with the exception of Southern Africa, where it increased significantly. Among historical determinants, this geographical pattern seems to reveal the long shadow of settler colonialism, at least in Sub-Saharan Africa; the spread of Islam stands out as another robust correlate. The poor quality of the raw data calls for great caution, in particular when analyzing country-level dynamics.

Instead of presenting one aspect of government intervention and assessing its effects on economic growth or financial stability, new interdisciplinary research studies credit policy as a whole. It examines the multiple dimensions of state intervention in financial markets (to guide the development and allocation of credit) and assesses the institutional complementarities between them. Although mostly focused on the most interventionist period (1930s-1970s), this literature allows for a reinterpretation of previous studies of financial history that have long emphasised the role of the state in the financial sector since at least the 19th century. Beyond the dichotomy between bank-based and market-based financial systems, it highlights the importance of debt guarantees, subsidies, the role of development banks or specialised credit and savings institutions as well as central banks and their liquidity. Providing insurance to limit the risk of investments and savings is not specific to a neoliberal vision of the state aimed at helping markets to function properly. It has also characterised classical liberalism (19th century) and periods of greater state intervention (1930s-1970s). The financial instruments are not new, but the nature of public-private partnerships is. Current credit policies subsidize investment and saving but involve little control on the final use of funds nor constraints on the organization and income of subsidized companies.. Furthermore, current state strategies to attract funds target institutional investors rather than individual savers, and adopt the financial and governance criteria of the former. Much more research is needed to confirm or refute these preliminary hypotheses. Last, I argue two other issues that should receive more attention in analytical studies of credit policy: the ideology associated with different regimes of credit regulation and the link between credit policy and international political economy.

Qui vote pour qui et pourquoi ? Comment la structure sociale des électorats des différents courants politiques en France a-t-elle évolué de 1789 à 2022 ? En s’appuyant sur un travail inédit de numérisation des données électorales et socio-économiques des 36 000 communes de France couvrant plus de deux siècles, cet ouvrage propose une histoire du vote et des inégalités à partir du laboratoire français. Au-delà de son intérêt historique, ce livre apporte un regard neuf sur les crises du présent et leur possible dénouement. La tripartition de la vie politique issue des élections de 2022, avec d’une part un bloc central regroupant un électorat socialement beaucoup plus favorisé que la moyenne – et réunissant d’après les sources ici rassemblées le vote le plus bourgeois de toute l’histoire de France –, et de l’autre des classes populaires urbaines et rurales divisées entre les deux autres blocs, ne peut être correctement analysée qu’en prenant le recul historique nécessaire. En particulier, ce n’est qu’en remontant à la fin du 19e siècle et au début du 20e siècle, à une époque où l’on observait des formes similaires de tripartition avant que la bipolarisation ne l’emporte pendant la majeure partie du siècle dernier, que l’on peut comprendre les tensions à l’œuvre aujourd’hui. La tripartition a toujours été instable alors que c’est la bipartition qui a permis le progrès économique et social. Comparer de façon minutieuse les différentes configurations permet de mieux envisager plusieurs trajectoires d’évolutions possibles pour les décennies à venir. Une entreprise d’une ambition unique qui ouvre des perspectives nouvelles pour sortir de la crise actuelle. Toutes les données collectées au niveau des 36 000 communes de France sont disponibles en ligne en accès libre sur le site une histoire du conflit politique.fr, qui comprend des centaines de cartes, graphiques et tableaux interactifs auxquels le lecteur pourra se reporter afin d’approfondir ses propres analyses et hypothèses.

Long considered suboptimal, capital controls and FX interventions are now recognized as prudential measures. Yet, whether they are used in combination remains an open question. Thanks to a rich dataset from 1950, we investigate how the response of FX reserves to an exogenous US monetary shock depends on capital controls. The response is insignificant with a very close capital account. By contrast, for a significant number of countries, FX reserves and capital controls are combined to tame the effects of an international financial shock. Yet, as countries open up financially, FX reserves replace capital controls. There is no one-sizes-fits-all recipe.

This paper reviews recent developments in the theory and practice of optimal capital taxation. We emphasize three main rationales for capital taxation. First, the frontier between capital and labour income flows is often fuzzy, thereby lending support to a broad-based, comprehensive income tax. Next, the very notions of income and consumption flows are difficult to define and measure for top wealth holders where capital gains due to asset price effects dwarf ordinary income and consumption flows. Therefore the proper way to tax billionaires is a progressive wealth tax. Finally, as individuals cannot choose their parents, there are strong meritocratic reasons why we should tax inherited wealth more than earned income or self-made wealth for which individuals can be held responsible, at least in part. This implies that the ideal fiscal system should also include a progressive inheritance tax, in addition to progressive income and wealth taxes. We then confront our prescriptions with historical experience. Although there are significant differences, we argue that observed fiscal systems in modern democracies bear important similarities with this ideal triptych.

Les termes de planification et d’économie de guerre sont familiers des historiennes et historiens. Ils décrivent des pratiques et modes de gouvernement présents dans de nombreux pays au cours du 20e siècle. Des années 1930 aux années 1970, ils ont fait l’objet de débats intellectuels considérables – mais souvent oubliés depuis – pour tenter de les définir ou de les lier entre eux. Ils reviennent aujourd’hui à l’aune d’une double interrogation.

A new international financial architecture is emerging, characterized by the normalization of some forms of capital control and the rise of bilateral loans between central banks. The issues of diplomacy and financial stability are intertwined. If authoritarian states with centralized power and without independence of central banks naturally find their account in this new state of the world, the monetary and financial institutions of democratic countries must establish a new legitimacy for their interventions that affect financial relations with foreign countries. Central banks cannot act alone and it is necessary to explicitly coordinate their action with other aspects of economic and foreign policy. This is as much a question of policy effectiveness as of democratic legitimacy

There have been important studies of recent income inequality and of poverty in South Africa, but very little is known about the long-run trends over time. There is speculation about the extent of inequality when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, but no hard evidence. In this paper, we provide evidence that is partial—being confined to top incomes—but which for the first time shows how the income distribution changed on a (near) annual basis from 1913 onwards. We present estimates of the shares in total income of groups such as the top 1% and the top 0.1%, covering the period from colonial times to the twenty-first century. For a number of years during the apartheid period, we have data classified by race. The estimates for recent years bear out the picture of South Africa as a highly unequal country, but allow this to be placed in historical and international context. The time series presented here will, we hope, provide the basis for detailed investigation of the impact of South African institutions and policies, past and present. But the similarity of the changes over time in top incomes across the four ex-dominions suggests that national developments have to be seen in the light of common global forces.

Paris came under siege twice between September 1870 and May 1871, first by the Prussian army and then by the Versailles government’s assault on the Commune. The first resulted in a severe famine; the second in a bloodbath. We investigate the impact of this crisis on child mortality, adult height, and adult mortality, using original vital records and military register data from one of the city’s lowest-income areas. Deaths more than doubled at all ages during this period, and under-5 mortality rates increased by 30% for children born in 1869 and 1870. Those conceived and gestated during the crisis ended up significantly shorter and faced 40% higher adult mortality than unaffected cohorts born afterwards, but children aged 2–5 later recovered in height as living conditions quickly improved. A nutritional shock’s translation into short-term variations in stature and into lifetime survival thus seems to depend not only on the shock’s duration but also on preceding and subsequent living conditions, which themselves interact with selection effects and critical age windows for physiological growth.

Disons-le d’emblée : aucun pays n’a inventé de système parfait permettant de lutter contre le racisme et les discriminations. L’enjeu est d’imaginer un nouveau modèle, transnational et universaliste, qui replace la politique antidiscriminatoire dans le cadre plus général d’une politique sociale et économique à visée égalitaire et universelle, et qui assume la réalité du racisme et des discriminations – pour se donner les moyens de les mesurer et de les corriger, sans pour autant figer les identités, qui sont toujours plurielles et multiples.

This article sheds new light on the long-run evolution of political cleavages in 21 Western democracies. We exploit a new database on the socioeconomic determinants of the vote, covering more than 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020. In the 1950s and 1960s, the vote for social democratic, socialist, and affiliated parties was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, giving rise in the 2010s to a disconnection between the effects of income and education on the vote: higher-educated voters now vote for the “left,” while high-income voters continue to vote for the “right.” This transition has been accelerated by the rise of green and anti-immigration movements, whose distinctive feature is to concentrate the votes of the higher-educated and lower-educated electorates. Combining our database with historical data on political parties’ programs, we provide evidence that the reversal of the education cleavage is strongly linked to the emergence of a new “sociocultural” axis of political conflict.

This article first describes the main developments in measuring the upper tail of the income and wealth distributions over the last twenty years. Second, it points out some of the key methodological challenges and how better data could address them. Third, it discusses the academic and policy impacts of upper tail measurement.

We define generalized Pareto curves as the curve of inverted Pareto coefficients b(p), where b(p) is the ratio between average income above rank p and the p-th quantile Q(p) (i.e., b(p)=E[X|X>Q(p)]/Q(p))). We use them to characterize income distributions. We develop a method to flexibly recover a continuous distribution based on tabulated income data as is generally available from tax authorities, which produces smooth and realistic shapes of generalized Pareto curves. Using detailed tabulations from quasi-exhaustive tax data, we show the precision of our method. It gives better results than the most commonly used interpolation techniques for the top half of the distribution.

Le rapport sur les inégalités mondiales 2022 propose une radiographie inédite des inégalités mondiales, avec la présentation des dernières données sur les écarts de revenu et de patrimoine à travers le monde, ainsi que de nouveaux résultats sur les injustices liées au genre et les inégalités environnementales. Ce travail, mené par une équipe de chercheurs franco-américains et reposant sur les efforts d’une centaine d’économistes à travers le monde, démontre avec force que les inégalités extrêmes qui caractérisent nombre de nos sociétés sont le résultat de choix politiques et n’ont rien d’une fatalité.

The Classical Gold Standard period, with high capital mobility and fixed-exchange rates, is usually seen as the extreme case of international constraints on monetary policy. Contrary to this view, we show how central bank balance sheets offset the effects of international shocks on domestic interest rates. In contrast, in the United States, a gold standard country without a central bank, the reaction of money market rates was two to four times stronger than that of interest rates in countries with a central bank. Our study is based on the monthly balance sheets of all central banks in the world (i.e., 21) from 1891–1913.

La rhétorique de l’économie de guerre est impropre pour qualifier la situation de notre pays face au conflit en Ukraine. Elle est aussi contreproductive pour le combat écologique

The terms economic planning and war economy are familiar to historians. They describe practices and modes of government found in many countries during the 20th century. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, these terms were the subject of considerable intellectual debate — though often forgotten since — in an attempt to define them or to connect them. Today, they are being revisited in light of a dual interrogation. First, economic planning is being presented as a possible solution to the ecological crisis by reorganizing production and consumption to keep in line with the objectives of reducing carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity. The concept of the war economy is sometimes added (sometimes referred to as “ecological war”) to mean that, as in a war, the whole of the economy’s organization must be oriented towards a single objective: victory, the only guarantee of survival for the majority of the population. War economy has been used in a second sense in relation to the environmental crisis to highlight the convergence of rising energy prices caused by the war in Ukraine and climate objectives to reduce carbon emissions.

The objective of this paper is to better understand the evolution and institutional roots of Hong Kong’s growing economic inequality and political cleavages. By combining multiple sources of data (household surveys, fiscal data, wealth rankings, national accounts) and methodological innovations, two main findings are obtained. First, he evidence suggests a very large rise in income and wealth inequality in Hong Kong over the last four decades. Second, based on the latest opinion poll data, business elites, who carry disproportionate weight in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, are found to be more likely to vote for the pro-establishment camp (presumably to ensure that policies are passed that protect their political and economic interests). This paper argues that the unique alliance of government and business elites in a partially democratic political system is the plausible institutional root of Hong Kong’s rising inequality and political cleavages.

Following the Age of Revolution (Osterhammel, 2014), Paris witnessed two wars at the end of the 19th century. First, in September 1870, the Prussian army besieged the French capital, and then, beginning in March 1871, so did the French government. Both sieges were waged on people perceived to be socially and politically dangerous.

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830-1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

We review developments in the history of money, banking, and financial intermediation over the last twenty years. We focus on studies of financial development, including the role of regulation and the history of central banking. We also review the literature of banking and financial crises. This area has been largely unaffected by the so-called new econometric methods that seek to prove causality in reduced form settings. We discuss why historical macroeconomics is less amenable to such methods, discuss the underlying concepts of causality, and emphasize that models remain the backbone of our historical narratives.

Grâce à une démonstration implacable, Thomas Philippon jette une lumière crue sur l’accroissement du pouvoir des monopoles aux États-Unis et ses conséquences néfastes sur les prix et l’investissement. L’analyse pourrait être prolongée en recourant à d’autres disciplines que l’économie.

Despite France’s importance in the interwar world economy, the scale of the French banking crises of 1930–1 and their consequences have never been fully assessed quantitatively. The lack of banking regulation severely limited the availability of balance sheet data. Using a new dataset of individual balance sheets from more than 300 banks, this article shows that the crises were much more severe than previously thought, although they did not affect the main commercial banks. By reconstructing financial flows, this study shows that the fall in bank credit was mostly driven by a flight‐to‐safety by deposits, from banks to savings institutions and the central bank. The decrease in bank deposits due to bank runs was offset by an increase in deposits with savings institutions, with the central bank, and in cash hoarding, whereas the decrease in bank credit was not offset by an increase in loans from non‐bank financial institutions. In line with the gold standard mentality, cash deposited with savings institutions and the central bank was used to decrease marketable public debt and increase gold reserves, rather than pursuing countercyclical policies. Despite massive capital inflows and rising aggregate money supply, France suffered from a severe, persistent credit crunch.

Measuring and understanding the evolution of wealth inequality is a key challenge for researchers, policy makers, and the general public. This paper breaks new ground on this topic by presenting a new method to estimate and study wealth inequality. This method combines fiscal data with household surveys and national accounts in order to provide annual wealth distribution series, with detailed breakdowns by percentiles, age, and assets. Using the case of France as an illustration, we show that the resulting series can be used to better analyze the evolution and the determinants of wealthinequality dynamics over the 1970-2014 period. We show that the decline in wealth inequality ends in the early 1980s, marking the beginning of a rise in the top 1% wealth share, though with significant fluctuations due largely to asset price movements. Rising inequality in savings rates coupled with highly stratified rates of returns has led to rising wealth concentration in spite of the opposing effect of house price increases. We develop a simple simulation model highlighting how changes in the combination of unequal savings rates, rates of return, and labor earnings that occurred in the early 1980s generated large multiplicative effects that led to radically different steady-state levels of wealth inequality. Taking advantage of the joint distribution of income and wealth, we show that top wealth holders are almost exclusively top capital earners, and increasingly fewer are made up of top labor.

Dans le cadre d’un partenariat avec l’institut Rousseau, la revue Études a réuni les économistes Gaël Giraud et Thomas Piketty pour débattre sur leurs critiques du capitalisme et mieux discerner leurs points de désaccord. Nous leur avons soumis ces questions : dans le contexte actuel de menace de désastre écologique et social, le capitalisme est-il réformable ? Quelles sont vos propositions respectives ? Deux thèmes principaux ont été abordés : le traitement des inégalités et la critique de la sacralisation de la propriété privée.

Depuis les années 1980, les inégalités sont reparties à la hausse dans la plupart des régions du monde, après une période relativement égalitaire dans l’après-guerre. Faut-il y voir la conséquence implacable de la mondialisation et de la technologie, ou bien plutôt un phénomène proprement politique et idéologique ? Pourquoi de nouvelles coalitions électorales unies par d’ambitieux programmes de redistribution des richesses tardent-elles à se développer, et quel est le lien avec la montée de nouveaux conflits identitaires, incarnée par les succès de Trump aux États-Unis, Le Pen en France, Modi en Inde ou encore Bolsonaro au Brésil ? Cet ouvrage collectif offre des pistes de réponses à ces questions en retraçant la transformation des clivages politiques dans 50 pays entre 1948 et 2020. À partir de l’exploitation d’enquêtes électorales couvrant de manière inédite les cinq continents, l’ouvrage étudie le lien entre les comportements de vote et les principales caractéristiques des électeurs telles que le revenu, le diplôme, le genre ou l’identité ethno-religieuse. Cette analyse permet de comprendre comment les mouvements politiques sont amenés à coaliser des intérêts et identités multiples dans les démocraties contemporaines. Une telle perspective historique et mondiale s’avère indispensable pour mieux appréhender l’avenir de la démocratie au XXIe siècle.

The last paper of the session was aimed at offering some insights from a later perspective. The researcher analysed and compared two market systems which coexisted in the 19th-century Paris Stock Exchange, the Coulisse (unregulated market) and the Parquet (strictly regulated), arguing for a complementarity of the two rather than a competition between them

Chapter 12 by Facundo Alvaredo, Lydia Assouad and Thomas Piketty is concerned with measuring inequality in the Middle East. Here, the authors reference and combine all income data existing in the region – household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data – in order to estimate income concentration in the region for the period 1990–2016. According to their benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64%, compared to 37% in Western Europe, 47% in the US and 55% in Brazil. This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil-rich and population-rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which is probably under-estimated, given limited access to accurate fiscal data). The authors stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East and hope more research can shed light on the dynamics of income concentration, within-country inequality, as well as the drivers of such extreme levels.

Depuis 2015, le taux d’inflation en zone euro demeure largement en dessous de 2 %, la cible annoncée par la Banque centrale européenne (BCE). Et ce alors même que la politique monétaire est extrêmement accommodante avec des taux d’intérêt en territoire négatif et un programme d’achats d’actifs sans précédent – encore augmenté depuis la crise du Covid‐19. Dans cette nouvelle Note du CAE, Philippe Martin, Éric Monnet et Xavier Ragot discutent des instruments utilisés par la BCE depuis 2010 et proposent un nouvel instrument de dernier ressort pour faire face à une prochaine crise : la monnaie hélicoptère. Cette stratégie contingente de relance de l’inflation se traduirait par des transferts directs aux ménages par la Banque centrale européenne, qui seraient arrêtés une fois la convergence à la cible d’inflation assurée. La BCE, dotée de ce nouvel outil, assorti d’une communication claire et précise de sa part, pourrait ainsi gagner en efficacité vis‐à‐vis de sa cible d’inflation et limiter l’accroissement continu des programmes d’achats d’actifs avec leurs effets collatéraux.

En présentant l’évolution en longue durée des inégalités entre classes sociales dans les sociétés humaines, Thomas Piketty propose une perspective nouvelle sur l’histoire de l’égalité. Il s’appuie sur une conviction forte forgée au fil de ses recherches : la marche vers l’égalité est un combat qui vient de loin, et qui ne demande qu’à se poursuivre au xxie siècle, pour peu que l’on s’y mette toutes et tous.

Paris School of Economics (PSE) observe empiriquement comment la discrimination se concentre sur certains salariés qui sont en position d’exercer un contrepouvoir légal au sein des entreprises, et tout particulièrement comment elle s’exerce à l’encontre des délégués syndicaux.

We assess income inequality across French and British colonial empires between 1920 and 1960, exploiting for the first time income tax tabulations. As measured by top income shares, inequality was high in colonies. Europeans comprised the bulk of top income earners, and only a minority of autochthons could compete income-wise. Top income shares were no higher in settlement colonies, those territories were wealthier and the average European settler was less rich than the average expatriate. Inequality among autochthons was moderate, and inequality among Europeans was similar to that of the metropoles. The post-WWII fall in income inequality can be explained by the one among Europeans, mirroring that of the metropoles, and does not imply that the European/autochthon income gap was very much reduced. After independence, the mass recruitment of state employees induced a large increase in inequality among autochthons. Dualistic structures lost their racial dimension and changed shape, yet persisted.

The introduction to the special issue of the Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine devoted to the book Capital and Ideology discusses the complementarities between the four texts in the issue and Thomas Piketty’s response. The very different fields and areas of these texts reflect the diversity and ambition of the book: the violent expansion of the United States to the West in the 19th century (Emmanuelle Perez Tisserant), post-reform China (Sebastian Veg), the French Revolution (Arnaud Orain) and British colonialism (Pat Hudson). All of them extend Thomas Piketty’s analyses and question the way in which ideologies and inegalitarian regimes are based on theories of the frontier and property. Different views emerge, however, on the role of the history of ideas and the relative autonomy of the ideological sphere from material conditions.

This paper sheds light on the fiscal trajectories of 18 former French colonies in Africa from colonial times to the present. Building upon own previous work about colonial public finance (Cogneau et al., 2021), we compile a novel dataset by combining previously available data with recently digitized data from historical archives, to produce continuous and comparable public revenue data series from 1900 to 2018. This allows us to study the evolution of the level and composition of fiscal revenues in the post-colonial decades, with a special focus on the critical juncture of independence. We find that very few countries achieved significant progress in fiscal capacity between the end of the colonial period and today, if we set aside income drawn from mineral resources. This is not explained by a lasting collapse of fiscal capacity at the time of independence. From 1960 to today, the reliance on mineral resource revenues increased on average and dependence on international commodity prices persisted, with few exceptions. The relative contribution of trade taxes declined after the structural adjustments, and lost trade revenues were not compensated by a sufficient increase in domestic taxes. However, for the most recent period, we do note an improvement in the capacity to collect taxes on the domestic economy.

Les banques centrales sont sous le feu des critiques : trop opaques, trop technocratiques, hyperpuissantes et coupées du peuple. Pourtant, il faut les penser comme un pilier de l’État-providence, leur rôle étant de nous protéger contre les aléas économiques. Dans les années à venir, elles seront une pièce maîtresse pour soutenir la transition écologique, financer la dette publique et produire une monnaie électronique. Mais dans quel cadre, avec quelle légitimité ? Quelle forme prendra l’argent demain ? Questions cruciales, qui montrent à quel point la monnaie est une question politique. Les banques centrales doivent être l’outil de la démocratie.

This text presents the hypothesis at the origin of this book, namely the crucial character of the Great War in the economic and social history of Europe in the 20th century, in comparison, in particular, with the Great Depression or the Second World War. It discusses the reasons for asking this question, both in terms of the evolution of the historiography of the Great War, and the place of this unprecedented conflict in the “spontaneous” representations of the 20th century (and thus among possible points of comparison for contemporary crises), particularly in the economic world, with the consequences this may have for economic policy choices made on a national or international scale. It presents the shocks resulting from the Great War: demographic and health shocks, rural and urban destruction, environmental damage, population movements, monetary and financial crises, instability of public finances, reduced trade, new fragilities of peace, the Bolshevik revolution. On the other hand, he considers several major areas in which the Great War was part of a longer movement, such as the rise of technosciences and social protection, transformations in business and work, the expanding role of States, and changes in international relations with the rise of national liberation movements in colonial empires and the establishment of international organizations. All in all, it suggests that the Great War may have been a unique turning point, from which the various local, national and international players drew the final lessons after 1945 and up to 1973, contributing to a new phase of globalization and proposing new answers to the nagging question of inequality.

In this paper, we mobilize newly available historical series from the World Inequality Database to construct world income distribution estimates from 1820 to 2020. We find that the level of global income inequality has always been very large, reflecting the persistence of a highly hierarchical world economic system. Global inequality increased between 1820 and 1910, in the context of the rise of Western dominance and colonial empires, and then stabilized at a very high level between 1910 and 2020. Between 1820 and 1910, both between-countries and within-countries inequality were increasing. In contrast, these two components of global inequality have moved separately between 1910 and 2020: Within-countries inequality dropped in 1910–1980 (while between-countries inequality kept increasing) but rose in 1980–2020 (while between-countries inequality started to decline). As a consequence of these contradictory and compensating evolutions, early 21st century neo-colonial capitalism involves similar levels of inequality as early 20th century colonial capitalism, though it is based on a different set of rules and institutions. We also discuss how alternative rules such as fiscal revenue sharing could lead to a significant drop in global inequality. (JEL: N30, O10, O40)

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830-1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

We assess the importance of individual and institutional experience in shaping macroeconomic policy by studying the persistence of gold standard monetary practices in the Bretton Woods system. Using new data from the IMF archives, we show that, although they were not required to, countries continued to back currency in circulation with gold. The longer an institution spent in the gold standard (and the older the policymakers), the tighter the link between gold and currency. Such “old habits” prevented dollars and gold from working as perfect substitutes and ultimately contributed to the demise of the Bretton Woods system. Our findings highlight the persistence of past practices, even in the face of radical institutional change, and its consequences on the international monetary system.

This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID.world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades, but the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners.

Chaque auteur exprime dans cet ouvrage son parcours, sa vision de la société et les actions qu’il propose d’entreprendre pour agir face aux dérèglements auxquels le monde doit faire face.Les lauréats du Prix du meilleur jeune économiste livrent dans cet ouvrage leur perception, leur compréhension, leurs analyses et leurs propositions de ce que pourrait ou devrait être l’avenir du monde. Ils répondent aux questions fondamentales que se posent aujourd’hui les économistes et les principaux dirigeants. Les inégalités qui se creusent depuis la fin du siècle dernier sont-elles encore tolérables ? L’État social a-t-il encore un avenir ? La mondialisation est-elle vraiment la cause de tous les maux ? L’Europe reste-t-elle un espace économique pertinent ? La science économique s’ouvre-t-elle enfin aux autres disciplines ? Chaque auteur exprime dans cet ouvrage son parcours, sa vision de la société et les actions qu’il propose d’entreprendre pour agir face aux dérèglements auxquels le monde doit faire face. Créé en 2000 par le Cercle des économistes et le journal Le Monde, le Prix du meilleur jeune économiste est décerné chaque année à un économiste de moins de 40 ans, sélectionné en raison de la reconnaissance de son expertise et de sa participation active au débat public et économique.

Si l’on m’avait dit en 1990 que je publierais en 2020 un recueil de chroniques intitulé ” Vivement le socialisme ! “, j’aurais cru à une mauvaise blague. Du haut de mes dix-huit ans, je venais de passer l’automne 1989 à écouter à la radio l’effondrement des dictatures communistes et du ” socialisme réel ” en Europe de l’Est. Seulement voilà : trente ans plus tard, en 2020, l’hyper-capitalisme a été beaucoup trop loin, et je suis maintenant convaincu qu’il nous faut réfléchir à un nouveau dépassement du capitalisme, une nouvelle forme de socialisme, participatif et décentralisé, fédéral et démocratique, écologique, métissé et féministe. L’histoire décidera si le mot ” socialisme ” est définitivement mort et doit être remplacé. Je pense pour ma part qu’il peut être sauvé, et même qu’il reste le terme le plus adapté pour désigner l’idée d’un système économique alternatif au capitalisme. En tout état de cause, on ne peut pas se contenter d’être ” contre ” le capitalisme ou le néo-libéralisme : il faut aussi et surtout être ” pour ” autre chose, ce qui exige de désigner précisément le système économique idéal que l’on souhaite mettre en place, la société juste que l’on a en tête, quel que soit le nom que l’on décide finalement de lui donner. Il est devenu commun de dire que le système capitaliste actuel n’a pas d’avenir, tant il creuse les inégalités et épuise la planète. Ce n’est pas faux, sauf qu’en l’absence d’alternative clairement explicitée, le système actuel a encore de longs jours devant lui.

This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID.world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades, but the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners.

While the “Trente Glorieuses” have been called into question for the environmental damage they caused, they nevertheless remain a period of exceptional growth characterized by a significant reduction of inequalities in income and wealth. For historians and economists alike, however, the sources of this expansionist phenomenon and its unravelling in the 1970s continues to raise questions. Mixing the qualitative approach much-loved by historians, who study archives for insight into the decision-making process and the quantitative approach characteristic of economists, Éric Monnet’s book offers an interpretation of Banque de France monetary policy at the intersection of two logics. In the present article, three economic historians discuss this interpretation and contextualize its contributions: Nicolas Delalande offers a political vision of state history; Laure Quennouëlle-Corre brings a more institutional and financial perspective to bear; and Laurent Warlouzet examines the question at the Franco-European level. In its conclusion, Éric Monnet offers his own perspective on this survey.

Toutes les sociétés humaines ont besoin de justifier leurs inégalités : il faut leur trouver des raisons, faute de quoi c’est l’ensemble de l’édifice politique et social qui menace de s’effondrer. Les idéologies du passé, si on les étudie de près, ne sont à cet égard pas toujours plus folles que celles du présent. C’est en montrant la multiplicité des trajectoires et des bifurcations possibles que l’on peut interroger les fondements de nos propres institutions et envisager les conditions de leur transformation.À partir de données comparatives d’une ampleur et d’une profondeur inédites, ce livre retrace dans une perspective tout à la fois économique, sociale, intellectuelle et politique l’histoire et le devenir des régimes inégalitaires, depuis les sociétés trifonctionnelles et esclavagistes anciennes jusqu’aux sociétés postcoloniales et hypercapitalistes modernes, en passant par les sociétés propriétaristes, coloniales, communistes et sociales-démocrates. À l’encontre du récit hyperinégalitaire qui s’est imposé depuis les années 1980-1990, il montre que c’est le combat pour l’égalité et l’éducation, et non pas la sacralisation de la propriété, qui a permis le développement économique et le progrès humain.En s’appuyant sur les leçons de l’histoire globale, il est possible de rompre avec le fatalisme qui nourrit les dérives identitaires actuelles et d’imaginer un socialisme participatif pour le XXIe siècle : un nouvel horizon égalitaire à visée universelle, une nouvelle idéologie de l’égalité, de la propriété sociale, de l’éducation et du partage des savoirs et des pouvoirs.

This paper examines intergenerational wealth mobility between fathers and children in France between 1848 and 1960. Considering wealth mobility in the long run requires taking into account not only positional mobility (that is, how families move within a given distribution of wealth), but also structural mobility induced by changes in the distribution of wealth. Such changes are related to two structural phenomena: in the nineteenth century, the rising number of individuals leaving no estate at death and, after World War I, the decline in the number of the very rich who could live off their wealth. The paper studies the movements between these groups and estimates the intergenerational elasticity of wealth, taking into account the persistence at the bottom and at the top.

This paper develops a simplified methodology to distribute total national income across income groups that reproduces closely the sophisticated methodology of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018). It starts from top income share series based on fiscal income of Piketty and Saez (2003) and makes two basic assumptions on how national income components not included in fiscal income are distributed: (1) nontaxable labor income and capital income from pension funds are distributed like taxable labor income; (2) other nontaxable capital income is distributed like taxable capital income. This methodology could be applied to countries with less data.

We combine national accounts, surveys, and new tax data to study the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China from 1978 to 2015. The national wealth-income ratio increased from 350 percent in 1978 to 700 percent in 2015, while the share of public property in national wealth declined from 70 percent to 30 percent. We provide sharp upward revision of official inequality estimates. The top 10 percent income share rose from 27 percent to 41 percent between 1978 and 2015; the bottom 50 percent share dropped from 27 percent to 15 percent. China’s inequality levels used to be close to Nordic countries and are now approaching US levels.

Has massive distribution of insecticide-treated-nets contributed to the reduction in in- fant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 15 years? Using large household surveys collected in 16 countries and exploiting the spatial correlation in distribution campaigns, we estimate the relationship between the diffusion of bednets and the progress in child sur- vival. We find no evidence of a causal link in cities, and no impact either in rural areas with low malaria prevalence. By contrast, in highly malarious rural areas where bednet coverage reached high levels, above 75% of households, infant mortality has been reduced by at least 3 percentage points, which amounts to 25% of the initial mortality. The identified impact is even higher for the children of mothers with no education. It lies at the upper bound found with RCTs, most likely because those were implemented in contexts with lower mortality and/or malaria prevalence

We combine household surveys and national accounts, as well as recently released tax data to track the dynamics of Indian income inequality from 1922 to 2015. According to our benchmark estimates, the top 1 percent of earners captured less than 21 percent of total income in the late 1930s, before dropping to 6 percent in the early 1980s and rising to 22 percent in the recent period. Our results appear to be robust to a range of alternative assumptions seeking to address numerous data limitations. These findings suggest that much more can be done to promote inclusive growth in India. We also stress the need for more transparency on income and wealth statistics, which is key to allow an informed democratic debate on inequality.

In this paper we combine household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data in order to estimate income concentration in the Middle East for the period 1990–2016. According to our benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64 percent, compared to 37 percent in Western Europe, 47 percent in the US and 55 percent in Brazil (see Alvaredo et al. 2018). This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil‐rich and population‐rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which we probably under‐estimate, given the limited access to proper fiscal data). We stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East, as well as the need to develop mechanisms of regional redistribution and investment.

The Gold Pool was probably the most ambitious case of central bank cooperation in history. Major central banks pooled interventions to stabilize the dollar price of gold. Why did it collapse? From at least 1964, the fate of the Pool was, in fact, tied to sterling, the first line of defense for the dollar. Sterling’s devaluation in November 1967 eventually spurred speculation and unbearable losses for the Pool. Inflationary U.S. policies were weakening confidence in the dollar. The demise of the Pool provides a striking example of contagion between reserve currencies and the limits of central bank cooperation.

The transformation of the relationship between states and their respective financial systems since the crisis has generated two contrary narratives. On the one hand, governmental agencies are often described as being at the mercy of the financial sector (“regulatory capture”). On the other hand, governments are criticized for using the financial system to their own ends (“financial repression.”) This article critically examines this debate, looking specifically at the European context in a historical perspective. The relationship between governments and financial systems in Europe cannot be reduced to the binary opposition between “capture” and “repression”; the channels of pressure and influence between governments and their financial systems have tended to run both ways. The current reconfiguration of national financial systems in Europe is not a return to interventionist policies, even though it is characterized by a greater political and economic role of public agencies and central banks. It is typical of neoliberal states where the diversified objectives of public authorities are aligned with the private interests of the financial sector.

In this paper we combine household surveys, national accounts, income tax data and wealth data in order to estimate income concentration in the Middle East for the period 1990–2016. According to our benchmark series, the Middle East appears to be the most unequal region in the world, with a top decile income share as large as 64 percent, compared to 37 percent in Western Europe, 47 percent in the US and 55 percent in Brazil (see Alvaredo et al. 2018). This is due both to enormous inequality between countries (particularly between oil‐rich and population‐rich countries) and to large inequality within countries (which we probably under‐estimate, given the limited access to proper fiscal data). We stress the importance of increasing transparency on income and wealth in the Middle East, as well as the need to develop mechanisms of regional redistribution and investment.

Recent research highlighted controversy about the evolution of concentration of personal wealth. In this paper we provide new evidence about the long-run evolution of top wealth shares for the United Kingdom. The new series covers a long period – from 1895 to the present – and has a different point of departure from the previous literature: we start with the analysis of the distribution of estates left at death. We find that the application to the estate data of mortality multipliers to yield estimates of wealth among the living does not substantially change the degree of concentration over much of the period both in the UK and US, allowing inferences to be made for years when this method cannot be applied. The results show that wealth concentration in the UK remained relatively constant during the first wave of globalization, but then decreased dramatically in the period from 1914 to 1979. The UK went from being more unequal in terms of wealth than the US to being less unequal. However, the decline in UK wealth concentration came to an end around 1980, and since then there is evidence of an increase in top shares, notably in the distribution of wealth excluding housing in recent years. We investigate the triangulating evidence provided by data on capital income concentration and on reported super fortunes.

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects inequality. Average pretax real national income per adult has increased 60% from 1980 to 2014, but we find that it has stagnated for the bottom 50% of the distribution at about $16,000 a year. The pretax income of the middle class—adults between the median and the 90th percentile—has grown 40% since 1980, faster than what tax and survey data suggest, due in particular to the rise of tax-exempt fringe benefits. Income has boomed at the top. The upsurge of top incomes was first a labor income phenomenon but has mostly been a capital income phenomenon since 2000. The government has offset only a small fraction of the increase in inequality. The reduction of the gender gap in earnings has mitigated the increase in inequality among adults, but the share of women falls steeply as one moves up the labor income distribution, and is only 11% in the top 0.1% in 2014.

This chapter summarises concepts, methods, and goals of the WID.world project, the World Inequality Database, along with some first results from this source. WID.world builds on the experience of the World Top Incomes Database (WTID) to construct time-series on the concentration of income at the very top of the distribution in more than 30 countries, to include wealth distribution and developing as well as developed countries. The ultimate goal of WID.world is to provide annual estimates of the distribution of income and wealth using concepts consistent with macro-economic accounts, i.e. to construct distributional national accounts (DINA). WID.world also aims to produce synthetic micro-files providing online information on income and wealth (i.e. individual level data that do not result from direct observation but rather through estimates that reproduce the observed distribution of the underlying data). The long-run aim of the WID.world project is to release income and wealth synthetic DINA micro-files for all countries on an annual basis.

We show that global income inequality can be relatively well estimated from 1980 to 2016, by combining data on national incomes and available Distributional National Accounts. Our contribution is threefold. First, we attempt to go beyond country-level inequality data by comparing inequality dynamics between and within large geographic aggregates such as Europe, North America or Asia. We show that inequality increased almost everywhere, but at different speeds, revealing the important of national institutions and policy in the shaping of inequality. Second, we combine data on income inequality within these aggregates to estimate a global distribution of income since 1980. We show that our general conclusions are robust to several alternative methodologies to measure global inequality. According to our benchmark results, the global richest 1% adults captured 27% of total income growth since 1980, that is two times more than the bottom 50% adults, who collectively captured 12% of total growth over the period. The top 1% income share increased from 16% to 20% over the period. We observe a trend-break after the financial crisis, but this is only due to between-country reduction in inequality, as within-country inequality continued to rise. Third, we estimate the future evolution of global inequality between 2016 and 2050 by testing several assumptions about national income and population growth rates and inequality dynamics. We find that optimist assumptions about growth in emerging countries in the future will not be sufficient reduce global inequality between individuals between now and 2050 if countries continue their own inequality trends since 1980, highlighting the need for a renewed debate on the set of policies required to generare more equitable growth pathways.

Why does it seem so difficultto build a sizeable developmenta state in Africa? Agrowing literature looks at the colonial roots of differences in economic development, often using the French/British difference as asource of variation to identify which features of the colonial pastmattered. We use historical archivestobuildanewdatasetofpublicfinancesin9Frenchand4Britishcoloniesof West Africa from 1900 to in dependence.Though we find some significant differences between French and British colonies, we conclude that over all patterns of public finances were similarin both empires. The most striking fact is the greatin crease in expenditure per capitain the last decades of colonization: it quadrupled between the end o World War II and independence. This increase inexpenditure was made possible partly by an increase incustoms revenue due to rising trade flows, but mostly by policy changes: netsubsidies from colonizers to their colonies became positive, while, within the colonies, direct and indirect taxation rates increased. We conclude that the last fifteen years of colonization area key period tounderstand colonial legacies.

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in Russia from the Soviet period until the present day. We find that official survey-based measures vastly under-estimate the rise of inequality since 1990. According to our benchmark estimates, top income shares are now similar to (or higher than) the levels observed in the United States. We also find that inequality has increased substantially more in Russia than in China and other ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. We relate this finding to the specific transition strategy followed in Russia. According to our benchmark estimates, the wealth held offshore by rich Russians is about three times larger than official net foreign reserves, and is comparable in magnitude to total household financial assets held in Russia.

The Mundell “trilemma” is widely used to discuss capital controls and monetary policy autonomy under Bretton Woods. Without denying its usefulness, this paper highlights two facts at odds with assumptions underlying the “trilemma” argument. First, conflicts between internal and external objectives were uncommon. Second, the use of quantitative credit controls allowed central banks to disconnect their interest rate from their monetary policy stance. This was considered by contemporaries as a way to escape international constraints. Capital controls were imposed to complement credit controls. Interest-rate spreads were neither a good measure of capital controls nor of central bank autonomy.

The recessions during the periods in the 1930s and starting in 2008 are compared on two points : a) public authorities’ reactions at the peak of these two banking and financial crises (which differed significantly thanks to what both the United States and Europe had learned during the Great Depression) ; and b) the financial regulations adopted in reaction to the 2008 meltdown. In the main, the regulations adopted during the Great Depression were gradually lifted between the 1950s and 1990s, thus doing away with many inconsistences and sources of inefficiency but also recreating considerable fragility – as became apparent in 2008. Owing to the political and scientific context, the long stagnation after 2008 has not (yet) set off a regulatory trend on as large a scale as during the Great Depression.

It is common wisdom that central banks in the postwar (1945–1970s) period were passive bureaucracies constrained by fixed-exchange rates and inflationist fiscal policies. This view is mostly retrospective and informed by US and UK experiences. This book tells a different story. Eric Monnet shows that the Banque de France was at the heart of the postwar financial system and economic planning, and that it contributed to economic growth by both stabilizing inflation and fostering direct lending to priority economic activities. Credit was institutionalized as a social and economic objective. Monetary policy and credit controls were conflated. He then broadens his analysis to other European countries and sheds light on the evolution of central banks and credit policy before the Monetary Union. This new understanding has important ramifications for today, since many emerging markets have central bank policies that are similar to Western Europe’s in the decades of high growth.

Previous research has downplayed the role of banking panics and financial factors in the French Great Depression. This column uses a newly assembled dataset of balance sheets for more than 400 French banks from the interwar period to challenge this long-held idea. The empirical results show two dramatic waves of panic in 1930 and 1931, and point to a flight-to-safety mechanism. The findings illustrate how minor macroeconomic assumptions and extrapolations on monetary statistics can introduce large, persistent biases in historiography.

In this paper, we use tax and household survey data to assess the history of income distribution in Argentina since the beginning of the 20th century. Until the 1970s, the country experienced a fall in inequality in spite of lower income growth. Since then, inequality has generally increased possibly as a result of large-scale shocks such as macroeconomic crises and reform attempts, resulting in a convergence towards traditionally more unequal neighboring countries.

Since banking regulation was introduced in France only in 1941, little is known about the balance sheets of French banks before that date. We do not have statistical information on the difficulties of banks in France during the Great Depression of the 1930s, let alone reliable information on the causes of bankruptcy and interbank contagion. This project aims to gather many historical sources to significantly improve our knowledge of the French banking system during the interwar period and, more generally to understand the reasons for the banking crises and the historical specificity of the French banking system. Our study was made possible by the discovery of exceptional archival sources. The Crédit Lyonnais textendash one of the four major banks textendash collected information for around 450 banks from 1910 until 1939 and, most important, standardized balance sheets to make them comparable. We present the sources and discuss why the Crédit Lyonnais constructed such a database. The accounting choices made by the Crédit Lyonnais to standardize banks’ balance sheets are telling to understand what the definition of a bank was before banking regulation was implemented. Two main conclusions stand out. First, we confirm recent analyses that textendash contrary to the conventional wisdom textendash had claimed that France experienced a massive series of banking failures. About one third of banks failed between 1929 and 1936. This is in sharp contrast with England, for example, where only some important merchant banks suffered (Billings and Capie, 2011). Second, we find that the banking crisis in France started just after the October 1929 stock market crash and was already very severe before the 1931 international shocks (Kreditanstalt failure and then Sterling devaluation). These two conclusions point out that the chronology of the French banking crisis differs from the chronology of other countries on one hand, and textendash most surprisingly textendash from the chronology of French economic cycle on the other hand (it is well-known that the Great Depression started later in France than abroad). These observations also go against the argument that attributes the difficulties of the French banking system to the Gold standard. The French 1929-1931 banking crisis was mostly due to domestic weaknesses and did not worsen in 1932-1936, while France was staying in the gold standard.

Un courant récent et influent, porté principalement par des économistes, propose de renouveler l’analyse historique à partir des notions d’expérience naturelle et de causalité. Il a la double ambition d’unifier diverses disciplines autour d’une acception commune de la causalité afin de réinterroger des grandes questions historiques (comme le rôle de la colonisation, des régimes politiques ou de la religion dans le développement économique) et de rendre l’analyse de l’histoire plus scientifique. La définition de la causalité qu’il promeut – de type interventionniste – vise à traiter les événements historiques comme un protocole d’expérience de laboratoire. Celle-ci s’articule avec une perspective néo-institutionnaliste visant à mesurer les effets dans la longue durée de certains changements institutionnels passés, considérés comme exogènes. Dans un premier temps, cet article présente les ambitions, les apports, les méthodes et les hypothèses (implicites et explicites) de ce courant de recherche, avant de montrer comment il se différencie de l’histoire économique quantitative plus traditionnelle, et de le resituer dans le contexte des récents tournants empirique et néo-institutionnaliste de la discipline économique. Dans un second temps, cet article fait état des critiques – souvent virulentes – formulées par des historiens ou des économistes à l’encontre de cette méthode et de ses objectifs. Enfin, nous insistons sur les difficultés de cette approche à prendre en compte l’historicité des phénomènes, à produire des énoncés généraux à partir de cas particuliers, et à proposer une définition complète et cohérente de la causalité en histoire.

Comment contenir le déferlement de la vague populiste qui risque de balayer nos démocraties ? Comment prévenir l’éclatement de l’Union européenne ? Pour en finir avec des politiques économiques disqualifiées, mettre l’austérité en minorité et lutter contre les inégalités, il est urgent de démocratiser le gouvernement de la zone euro. Rédigé par une équipe pluridisciplinaire de juristes, politistes et économistes, repris par Benoît Hamon, le projet de traité, ici présenté et commenté, institue une Assemblée parlementaire de la zone euro permettant de promouvoir la justice fiscale et sociale. Le traité peut être adopté en l’état par les pays qui s’y rallieront. Le texte est précédé d’une introduction qui expose sa mise en œuvre de façon pédagogique. L’objectif est que chaque citoyen s’empare du débat européen et que les différentes forces sociales et politiques contribuent à améliorer ce projet et à nous sortir de la sinistrose ambiante.

This paper provides historical series on the evolution of the share of inherited wealth in aggregate private wealth in Europe (France, the UK, Germany, Sweden) and the USA over the 1900–2010 period. Until 1910, the inheritance share was very high in Europe (70–80%). It then fell abruptly following the 1914–45 shocks, down to about 30–40% during the 1950–80 period, and is back to 50–60% (and rising) since around 2010. The US pattern also appears to be U-shaped, albeit less marked, and with significant uncertainty regarding recent trends, due to data limitations. We discuss possible interpretations for these long-run patterns.

This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data.

We use a novel income tax data set to present evidence on the evolution of income concentration in the last 60 years of colonial rule in India. These data allow us to study the evolution of income concentration at the country level as well as the location of top income earners across provinces. We identify three key facts: (1) the evolution of income concentration in British India was nonlinear, following a U-shape, (2) the majority of top income earners were non-Europeans, and (3) the geographical location of top income earners changed over time with the province of Bombay gaining in importance in the early XXth century. We provide an interpretation of these results in the light of the economic and political changes in British India over the period.

Tony Atkinson is universally celebrated for his outstanding contributions to the measurement and analysis of inequality, but he never saw the study of inequality as a separate branch of economics. He was an economist in the classical sense, rejecting any sub-field labelling of his interests and expertise, and he made contributions right across economics. His death on 1 January 2017 deprived the world of both an intellectual giant and a deeply committed public servant in the broadest sense of the term. This collective tribute highlights the range, depth and importance of Tony’s enormous legacy, the product of almost fifty years’ work.

Tandis que la Côte d’Ivoire a renoué avec la croissance depuis 2011 et se place sous les auspices de plans de développement ambitieux, les enquêtes sur le niveau de vie des ménages couvrant les trois dernières décennies montrent tout à la fois une amélioration sensible du revenu moyen et un maintien des inégalités. La pauvreté demeure donc plus élevée qu’à la fin des années 1980. En complément, l’accès aux données originales de l’impôt sur le revenu permet de capter les hauts salaires versés dans le privé. Le salariat formel privé ou public continue de protéger de la pauvreté et demeure surreprésenté parmi les hauts revenus. Cependant, le rationnement persistant de ce type d’emploi fait que le secteur informel est devenu majoritaire chez les riches urbains comme chez les pauvres.

This paper aims at explaining the changes in the number of bankruptcies during the second part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We firstly study these changes in the perspective of the evolution of the French insolvency law; we then introduce a geographic dimension that we show to be very relevant. We indeed observe that the court of the Paris district is more tolerant than the others; however, this kind of use of the law will spread in the other courts until the reform in 1889 that creates the judicial liquidation. The spatial analysis permits us to show that the changes in the law do not explain the total variations of the total amount of bankruptcies. The local practices, the way judicial agents act and the changes in the firms’ strategies are also essential in the explanation.

Social security contributions (SSCs) are typically formally split between employers and employees as payroll taxes, levied on earnings at a constant tax rate that applies only up to a ceiling, above which the marginal tax rate falls to a reduced rate, often 0. Such contribution ceilings create a concave kink point in the budget set of workers and hence should generate a dip in the distribution of earnings around the ceiling through labour supply responses (the reverse of bunching expected at convex kink points) but such a dip is not observed empirically. This paper sets out a new approach to infer the incidence of SSCs that exploits the absence of this dip and the fact that (mechanically) the distributions of labour cost (earnings inclusive of all payroll taxes), gross earnings (net of employer payroll taxes) and net earnings (net of both employer and employee payroll taxes) cannot all be smooth around a kink. The other papers in this special issue apply the method to data for Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK and all find that distribution of gross earnings is smooth around kinks (implying that the distributions of labour costs and net-of-tax earnings are not) even though the concept of gross earnings is irrelevant in the standard static model of labour supply and demand that dominates the public economics literature. This suggests that other features of the labour market, such as wage bargaining based on the gross earnings concept, are relevant for determining the incidence of SSCs.

Les cas de discrimination à l’encontre des syndicalistes s’accumulent. En témoignent la multiplication des procédures judiciaires et les condamnations dont ont fait l’objet de nombreuses grandes entreprises françaises. Ce constat qualitatif a été conforté par les résultats statistiques obtenus à partir de l’enquête Relations professionnelles et négociations d’entreprise (REPONSE) de 2004 qui font apparaître qu’à niveaux de diplôme et âges égaux, les délégués syndicaux sont payés environ 10 % de moins que leurs collègues, ce que confirme, on le montre ici, la version 2010 de l’enquête. L’appartenance à un syndicat ne suffit pas à expliquer ces moins bons salaires. Ce sont en effet les représentants syndiqués, les plus actifs dans la défense des intérêts de leurs collègues, qui sont les plus pénalisés. Il est, en pratique, difficile d’établir que ces salariés ont des salaires inférieurs pour d’autres raisons que leurs responsabilités syndicales. Les pénalités salariales pour les syndiqués sans mandat restent en effet assez faibles – de l’ordre de 4 % – tandis qu’inversement, ce sont dans les entreprises où il y a des conflits que les délégués syndicaux sont le plus pénalisés.

The concentration of personal wealth is now receiving a great deal of attention – after having been neglected for many years. One reason is the growing recognition that, in seeking explanations for rising income inequality, we need to look not only at wages and earned income but also at income from capital, particularly at the top of the distribution. In this paper, we use evidence from existing data sources to attempt to answer three questions: (i) What is the share of total personal wealth that is owned by the top 1 per cent, or the top 0.1 per cent? (ii) Is wealth much more unequally distributed than income? (iii) Is the concentration of wealth at the top increasing over time? The main conclusion of the paper is that the evidence about the UK concentration of wealth post‐2000 is seriously incomplete and significant investment in a variety of sources is necessary if we are to provide satisfactory answers to the three questions.

From September 1870 to February 1871, the Prussian army’s siege of Paris resulted in a harsh famine. Using original data from vital records and military registers, we investigate the impact of the siege in terms of both mortality and the height stature of survivors in one of the poorest areas of the city. We first estimate that deaths more than doubled at all ages during the 6-month siege and that child mortality rates increased by more than 25% (10 percentage points) for children born in 1869 or 1870. Second, we find little impact of famine on the height of individuals less than 5 years old during the siege, but a rather large deficit exists at ages 6 to 10. After having examined selection effects linked to mortality, fertility and migration, we argue that the siege was short-lived enough that many early-age survivors were able to catch up in stature.

En même temps qu’elle bénéficie d’un regain d’intérêt certain, l’histoire économique de l’Afrique suscite aujourd’hui des controverses méthodologiques intenses, dont deux livres publiés récemment par Morten Jerven se font l’écho, Poor Numbers et Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong.

At the end of the 1980s, Côte d’Ivoire entered a deep macroeconomic crisis that put an end to the often-praised ‘Ivorian miracle’. After the death of the founding father Houphouet-Boigny, unrestrained political competition added to bad economic conditions and led to the nightmare of civil war. Drawing from a series of five household surveys covering two decades(1988-2008), we tell the story of this descent into hell from the standpoint of poverty and living standards. In 2008, after five years of civil war and another episode yet to come (2010-11), theextreme US$1.25 poverty headcount had reached a historical record, with Northern areas deeplyimpoverished by the partition.

La création des banques qui sont devenues les banques centrales modernes s’étend du xvii e siècle (la Banque d’Amsterdam, la Banque de Suède et la Banque d’Angleterre) au xx e siècle (le Federal Reserve System des États-Unis et bien d’autres). Fondées dans des contextes très différents, ces banques ont, à l’origine, peu en commun.

Cet ouvrage rassemble l’intégralité des chroniques de Thomas Piketty parues dans Libération et dans Le Monde de janvier 2012 à septembre 2016. Traitant de problématiques tant françaises qu’internationales, l’économiste de renom commet une soixantaine de textes incisifs qui analysent, révèlent, et critiquent implacablement. Un ouvrage accessible proposant de nombreuses entrées et une préface inédite pour saisir la pensée de l’économiste auteur du best-seller Le capital au XXIe siècle (Seuil).

By applying regression discontinuity designs to a set of household surveys from the 1980–90s, we examine whether Côte d’Ivoire’s aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries. At the border of Ghana and at the end of the 1980s, large discontinuities are detected for consumption, child stunting, and access to electricity and safe water. Border discontinuities in consumption can be explained by differences in cash crop policies (cocoa and coffee). When these policies converged in the 1990s, the only differences that persisted were those in rural facilities. In the North, cash crop (cotton) income again made a difference for consumption and nutrition (the case of Mali). On the one hand, large differences in welfare can hold at the borders dividing African countries despite their assumed porosity. On the other hand, border discontinuities seem to reflect the impact of reversible public policies rather than intangible institutional traits.

This chapter offers an overview of the empirical and theoretical research on the long-run evolution of wealth and inheritance. Wealth–income ratios, inherited wealth, and wealth inequalities were high in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries up until World War I, then sharply dropped during the twentieth century following World War shocks, and have been rising again in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We discuss the models that can account for these facts. We show that over a wide range of models, the long-run magnitude and concentration of wealth and inheritance are an increasing function of image where image is the net-of-tax rate of return on wealth and g is the economy’s growth rate. This suggests that current trends toward rising wealth–income ratios and wealth inequality might continue during the twenty-first century, both because of the slowdown of population and productivity growth, and because of rising international competition to attract capital.

J’aimerais voir dans Le capital au XXIe siècle un livre de sciences sociales, davantage qu’un livre d’économie ou d’histoire. Il me semble que nous perdons trop de temps en sciences sociales autour de petites querelles de frontières et de postures méthodologiques souvent un peu stériles, et que ces oppositions entre disciplines peuvent et doivent être dépassées. Je ne pouvais espérer de plus bel hommage à ma démarche que cet ensemble de textes provenant de spécialistes issus d’horizons très différents, et dont j’admire profondément les travaux [1][1] Je suis extrêmement reconnaissant aux Annales d’avoir…. Il m’est impossible dans le cadre de ce court article de répondre à tous les points soulevés et de rendre justice à la richesse de ces textes. Après un retour rapide sur mes principales propositions, je voudrais simplement tenter de préciser un petit nombre de questions et de clarifier certains éléments sans doute insuffisamment mis en valeur dans le livre, en mettant particulièrement en évidence la perspective d’une histoire multidimensionnelle du capital et des relations de pouvoir.

Dans le cadre de cet article, Thomas Piketty ne peut répondre à tous les points soulevés et de rendre justice à la richesse de ces textes. Il voudrait simplement tenter de préciser un petit nombre de questions, et de clarifier certains éléments sans doute insuffisamment mis en valeur dans le livre. Je voudrais tout d’abord résumer brièvement ce que j’ai essayé de faire dans ce travail. Il s’agit avant tout d’un livre sur l’histoire du capital et de la répartition des richesses, et des conflits suscités par cette inégale répartition. Mon principal objectif a été de rassembler, grâce au travail combiné d’une trentaine de chercheurs (notamment Anthony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Facundo Alvaredo et Gabriel Zucman), des sources historiques portant sur l’évolution des patrimoines et des revenus dans plus de vingt pays depuis le 18e siècle. La première ambition de ce livre est de présenter ces matériaux historiques de façon cohérente (…).

In this article, I present three key facts about income and wealth inequality in the long run emerging from my book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and seek to sharpen and refocus the discussion about those trends. In particular, I clarify the role played by r > g in my analysis of wealth inequality. I also discuss some of the implications for optimal taxation, and the relation between capital-income ratios and capital shares.

In this article, I seek to sharpen the discussion about my book Capital in the twenty-first century, and to address some of the many issues raised by the very interesting papers that were put together by the editors of Basic Income Studies. I start by summarizing the multidimensional approach to capital and power that I develop in my book. I then clarify the role played by r>g in my analysis of wealth inequality. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of my analysis for optimal taxation; the relation between wealth, welfare and power; the basic income proposal; and the regulation of capital and property relations.

Cet article effectue une revue sélective de travaux récents d’économistes étudiant l’impact des institutions historiques sur le développement économique en Afrique. Nous discutons d’abord quelques questions conceptuelles impliquées par la mesure des institutions, puis présentons les données rassemblées par l’anthropologue G. P. Murdock et leurs principales critiques. Plusieurs travaux mobilisent à nouveau ces données pour montrer que certaines institutions “ethniques” précoloniales constituent des déterminants fondamentaux des différences de développement contemporaines. Nous commentons ces travaux puis les comparons avec d’autres qui relativisent plutôt les différences institutionnelles héritées de la période coloniale. Nous défendons en conclusion que des comparaisons d’études de cas sont plus fructueuses que des études transversales reposant sur des variations mal contrôlées.

Co-auteur du best seller Pour une révolution fiscale (75 000 exemplaires, ed. du Seuil 2011), Thomas Piketty rassemble dans cet opus l’ensemble de ses chroniques parues dans Libération depuis la crise financière. Un opus qui déconstruit le modèle néo-libéral régissant l’économie depuis plusieurs décennies et qui analyse la financiarisation de l’économie, le rôle délétère des banques, la nécessité de réformer la fiscalité, la montée des inégalités…

Uncertainties persist in sub-Saharan Africa regarding both the availability of land which could be put under cultivation as well as the potential for an important improvement in yields. In order to shed light on these questions, this paper analyzes in detail the evolution of land use and agricultural productivity in Ghana over the period 1991-2005. We use data from three di erent sources, the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS), the Food and Agricultural Organisation data and satellite imagery. We document how, and under which conditions, a household survey such as the GLSS can be used to measure the evolution over time of aggregate land use, agricultural production and yields in a developing country like Ghana. We then show that the surface of land farmed per capita has increased over the period, resulting in a twofold increase of the total land under cultivation in Ghana. We provide indirect evidence that the expansion of land under cultivation is mainly shortening of fallows in the southern forest region and new land put under cultivation in the northern savannah region. Altogether we nd little evidence of an emerging land constraint in the agricultural sector in Ghana.

I am most grateful to the editors of the British Journal of Sociology for putting together such an impressive set of review papers about my book. I am very honoured by the very thoughtful essays written by such a distinguished group of scholars coming from sociology, political science, anthropology, history, geography and economics. I warmly thank all participants for their time and attention to my work. I would like to view my book more as work of social science than one of economics or history. It seems to me that we often loose a lot of time in the social sciences because of little disputes about disciplinary boundaries. I could not dream of a better recognition for my work than the stimulating collection of interdisciplinary essays that the British Journal of Sociology is now publishing. I am very fortunate to have so many great readers. There is no way I can do justice to the richness of each review and address the many stimulating points that they raise. I would like however to take this opportunity to briefly clarify a number of issues.

When faced with a run on a “systemically important” but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate was formed penalizing those who had participated in the copper speculation that had caused the crisis bringing the bank down. Creation of the syndicate and other actions were consistent with mitigating the moral hazard from such an intervention. This episode contrasts the advice given by Bagehot to the Bank of England to counter a panic by lending freely at a high rate on good collateral, allowing insolvent institutions to fail.

This Review presents basic facts regarding the long-run evolution of income and wealth inequality in Europe and the United States. Income and wealth inequality was very high a century ago, particularly in Europe, but dropped dramatically in the first half of the 20th century. Income inequality has surged back in the United States since the 1970s so that the United States is much more unequal than Europe today. We discuss possible interpretations and lessons for the future.

The evolution of inequality in France is specific compared with most OECD countries. Inequality only started to rise at the end of the 1990s after a period of decline during the 1970s and the 1980s. This late increase partly explains the limited effects of inequality on social, political, and cultural outcomes. However, social gradients like income or education play a considerable role for fields such as health, housing, political participation, or trust in institutions. France is also particular with regard to the role of taxation. This chapter provides evidence about the absence of progressivity in the tax system. It concludes that the reforms implemented during the past decade have contributed to the increase in income inequality.

We divide decedents into two groups: “rentiers” (whose wealth is smaller than the capitalized value of their inherited wealth) and “savers” (who consumed less than their labor income). Applying this split to a unique micro data set on inheritance and matrimonial property regimes, we find that Paris from 1872 to 1927 was a “rentier society”. Rentiers made up about 10% of the population of Parisians but owned 70% of aggregate wealth. Rentier societies thrive when the rate of return on private wealth r is larger than the growth rate g (say, r = 4% vs g = 2%). This was the case in the 19th and early 20th centuries and is likely to happen again in the 21st century. At the time, top successors’ capital income sustains living standards far beyond what labor income alone would permit.

This paper derives optimal top tax rate formulas in a model where top earners respond to taxes through three channels: labor supply, tax avoidance, and compensation bargaining. The optimal top tax rate increases when there are zero-sum compensation-bargaining effects. We present empirical evidence consistent with bargaining effects. Top tax rate cuts are associated with top one percent pretax income shares increases but not higher economic growth. US CEO “pay for luck” is quantitatively more prevalent when top tax rates are low. International CEO pay levels are negatively correlated with top tax rates, even controlling for firms’ characteristics and performance.

There is little doubt that both urbanization and industrialization changed the way people live and interact. However, even though family structure has long been considered as the best indicator of the changes induced, little is known, empirically, about its evolution. We take advantage of a large dataset of matched censuses in a fast industrializing city to investigate how families function in a new environment. We show that family formation confronted two structural forces: the sheer numbers of migrants and the company that dominated the labor market. The company tried to promote a new family model by allowing only some kinds of migrants, selected through housing and labor, to settle in the city. Many aspects of their lives were thus constrained by the firm’s paternalistic organization. This process did not occur without resistance but it contributed to the integration of migrants in the city of Le Creusot.

In their paper “Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development” [Econometrica 81(1): 113-152], Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou claim that they document a strong relationship between pre-colonial political centralization and regional development, by combining Murdock’s ethnographic atlas (1967) with light density at night measures at the local level. We argue that their estimates do not properly take into account population effects. Among lowly populated areas, luminosity is dominated by noise, so that with linear specifications the coefficient of population density is biased downwards. We reveal that the identification of the effect of ethnic centralization very much relies on these areas. We implement a variety of models where the effect of population density is non-linear, and/or where the bounded or truncated nature of luminosity is taken into account. We conclude that the impact of ethnic-level political centralization on development is all contained in its long-term correlation with population density. We also abstract from the luminosity-population nexus by analyzing survey data for 33 countries. We show that individual-level outcomes like access to utilities, education, asset ownership etc. are not correlated with ethnic-level political centralization.

L’enquête TRA constitue un dispositif de recherche unique fondé sur la collecte nominative à l’échelle nationale de données historiques décrivant la situation personnelle, professionnelle et économique d’individus mariés ou décédés entre le début du xixe siècle et le milieu du xxe siècle. À l’occasion de la mise à disposition de la première partie des données produites par l’enquête, cet article présente les principes et les sources à partir desquelles elle a été construite, puis l’évaluation de sa représentativité dans l’espace et au cours du temps. En prenant pour exemple l’évolution de la part des individus qui décèdent sans aucune richesse telle qu’elle peut être construite grâce à cette base, il est intéressant de disposer d’un tel outil pour écrire une histoire économique qui soit de manière indissociable micro et macrosociale. Enfin, l’analyse montre comment le dispositif proposé par l’enquête TRA peut être étendu à toute nouvelle source nominative. C’est le principe et la vocation de cette enquête qui, loin d’être close, est une matrice pour étudier les transformations qui affectent pendant deux siècles la société française et, plus largement, bien d’autres sociétés.

How do aggregate wealth-to-income ratios evolve in the long run and why? We address this question using 1970–2010 national balance sheets recently compiled in the top eight developed economies. For the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France, we are able to extend our analysis as far back as 1700. We find in every country a gradual rise` of wealth-income ratios in recent decades, from about 200–300% in 1970 to 400–600% in 2010. In effect, today’s ratios appear to be returning to the high values observed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (600–700%). This can be explained by a long-run asset price recovery (itself driven by changes in capital policies since the world wars) and by the slowdown of productivity and population growth, in line with the β=sg Harrod-Domar-Solow formula. That is, for a given net saving rate s = 10%, the long-run wealth-income ratio β is about 300% if g = 3% and 600% if g = 1.5%. Our results have implications for capital taxation and regulation and shed new light on the changing nature of wealth, the shape of the production function, and the rise of capital shares.

The partition of German Togoland after World War I provides a natural experiment to test the impact of British and French colonization. Using data of recruits to the Ghanaian colonial army 1908–1955, we find that literacy and religious affiliation diverge at the border between the parts of Togoland under British and French control as early as in the 1920s. We partly attribute this to policies towards missionary schools. The divergence is only visible in the South where educational and evangelization efforts were strong. Contemporary survey data show that border effects that began in colonial times still persist today.

Central banking in France from 1948 to 1973 was a paradigmatic example of a policy that relied on quantities rather than interest rates. Standard SVAR analyses support the common view that monetary policy was ineffective during this period. However, this approach fails to identify the stance of monetary policy since it does not account for the specificity of quantitative controls on money and credit. An alternative identification strategy based on a narrative approach suggests that monetary policy shocks had strong and lasting effects in the conventional direction and accounted for nearly half of the variance in output and price levels.

Nous examinons, en nous appuyant sur l’enquête Patrimoine 2010 de l’Insee, la différence de composition du patrimoine entre les indépendants en activité et les retraités. L’objectif est de mieux comprendre les implications de la cessation d’activité sur la richesse de ces ménages dont le départ à la retraite s’accompagne généralement de la cession ou de la transmission d’un capital professionnel. La situation des salariés est utilisée à titre de comparaison. Toutes choses égales par ailleurs, le patrimoine des ménages de jeunes retraités salariés est plus élevé que celui des ménages de salariés âgés, ce qui suggère que la désépargne nette n’a pas encore débuté chez les premiers. En revanche, pour les indépendants, le patrimoine des actifs ne diffère pas significativement de celui des retraités, sauf dans le cas des exploitants agricoles, pour lesquels on observe une forte baisse. Chez les artisans, commerçants et professions libérales, on observe que le patrimoine varie peu en niveau, seule sa composition change, le patrimoine professionnel étant transformé en patrimoine privé après sa vente. Cela correspond à un modèle dans lequel l’outil professionnel est vendu et non transmis. En comparaison avec les salariés, la moindre accumulation pourrait résulter de la nécessité de compenser une perte de revenus plus élevée lors du passage à la retraite. Pour les exploitants agricoles, la forte baisse de la richesse totale résulte de la disparition du capital professionnel qui n’est pas compensée par l’augmentation des autres composantes. Ces résultats sont plus proches d’un modèle familial dans lequel l’outil de production est transmis (aux enfants) et ce d’autant plus que la forte baisse non compensée du capital professionnel pourrait s’expliquer par l’existence d’un dispositif très particulier, le salaire différé, créance détenue par les aides familiaux (les enfants) sur l’actif professionnel et pouvant être honorée, libre de droits, lors de la cessation d’activité.

Cet ouvrage a été rédigé juste après l’élection présidentielle contestée de novembre 2010 en Côte d’Ivoire, l’arrestation de Laurent Gbagbo et l’installation au pouvoir de son challenger au second tour Alassane Ouattara.

This paper aims at presenting an historical perspective on some of the major questions raised by Hyman Minsky and his recent followers, in particular about the instability of banking practices and the diffusion of the “originate and distribute” model under the domination of securities markets. We will argue that, when dealing with these issues, one must take great care at distinguishing what is actually new and what is recurrent. Financial innovation is nothing new. Risk taking through financial innovation is not new either. Banks have been innovating constantly over the last centuries, and many of their practices that we consider as “traditional” have not always been so, and result from a long process involving trials and errors, each error usually resulting in excessive risk-taking and waves of failures. We point out that markets have survived these crises when they have been able to organize and build the institutional structure allowing the various interests involved to become consistent with each other.

This handbook chapter reviews recent developments in the theory of optimal labor income taxation. We emphasize connections between theory and empirical work that were initially lacking from optimal income tax theory. First, we provide historical and international background on labor income taxation and means-tested transfers. Second, we present the simple model of optimal linear taxation. Third, we consider optimal nonlinear income taxation with particular emphasis on the optimal top tax rate and the optimal profile of means-tested transfers. Fourth, we consider various extensions of the standard model including tax avoidance and income shifting, international migration, models with rent-seeking, relative income concerns, the treatment of couples and children, and non-cash transfers. Finally, we discuss limitations of the standard utilitarian approach and briefly review alternatives. In all cases, we use the simplest possible models and show how optimal tax formulas can be derived and expressed in terms of sufficient statistics that include social marginal welfare weights capturing society’s value for redistribution, behavioral elasticities capturing the efficiency costs of taxation, as well as parameters of the earnings distribution. We also emphasize connections between actual practice and the predictions from theory, and in particular the limitations of both theory and empirical work in settling the political debate on optimal labor income taxation and transfers.

This paper reviews recent developments in the theory of optimal labor income taxation. We emphasize connections between theory and empirical work that were initially lacking from optimal income tax theory. First, we provide historical and international background on labor income taxation and means-tested transfers. Second, we present the simple model of optimal linear taxation. Third, we consider optimal nonlinear income taxation with particular emphasis on the optimal top tax rate and the optimal profile of means-tested transfers. Fourth, we consider various extensions of the standard model including tax avoidance and income shifting, international migration, models with rent-seeking, relative income concerns, the treatment of couples and children, and non-cash transfers. Finally, we discuss limitations of the standard utilitarian approach and briefly review alternatives. In all cases, we use the simplest possible models and show how optimal tax formulas can be derived and expressed in terms of sufficient statistics that include social marginal welfare weights capturing society’s value for redistribution, behavioral elasticities capturing the efficiency costs of taxation, as well as parameters of the earnings distribution. We also emphasize connections between actual practice and the predictions from theory, and in particular the limitations of both theory and empirical work in settling the political debate on optimal labor income taxation and transfers.

For three decades, the debate about rising income inequality in the United States has centered on the dispersion of wages and the increased premium for skilled/educated workers, attributed in varying proportions to skill-biased technological change and to globalization (for example, see Katz and Autor 1999 for a survey). In recent years, however, there has been a growing realization that most of the action has been at the very top. This has attracted a great deal of public attention (as witnessed by the number of visits to and press citations of our World Top Incomes Database at http://topincomes.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/) and has represented a challenge to the economics profession. Stories based on the supply and demand for skills are not enough to explain the extreme top tail of the earnings distribution; nor is it enough to look only at earned incomes. Different approaches are necessary to explain what has happened in the United States over the past century and also to explain the differing experience in other high-income countries over recent decades. We begin with the international comparison in the first section and then turn to the causes and implications of the evolution of top income shares.

This paper presents new findings from the World Top Incomes Database and discusses some of their policy implications. In particular, the paper provides updated top income series for the United States–including new estimates through 2010, showing a strong rebound of the top 1 percent income share, following the 2008-09 sharp fall. It also presents updated income series for other developed countries (including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan) and new series on wealth-income ratios. In light of this extended set of country series, the paper analyzes the relative importance of market and institutional forces in explaining observed cross-country trends, and the likely impact of the Great recession on these long-term evolutions. It discusses the policy implications of the findings, both in terms of optimal tax policy and regarding the interplay between inequality and macroeconomic fragility.

A growing body of research in economics and in business and economic history has shown the key role of bankruptcy and insolvency law on business organization, firms’ governance, and entrepreneurial choices. Most research, however, has focused on the formal aspects of laws, and still little is known on how various systems worked in practices. This paper fills this gap in the literature analyzing the functioning of bankruptcy procedures in four main European economies (Italy, France, England, and Germany) between ca.1880 and 1914. Using an original data set and descriptive statistics on length, organization, and return of procedures, the paper shows how the aim of attracting debtors was more successful in the less regulated English system, but how the protection of creditors’ rights was more efficiently pursued in France and Germany. Italy appears as the absolute worst performer.

This paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that capture the key equity-efficiency trade-off, are expressed in terms of estimable sufficient statistics, and are robust to the underlying structure of preferences. We consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous bequest tastes and labor productivities. We limit ourselves to simple but realistic linear or two-bracket tax structures to obtain tractable formulas. We show that long-run optimal inheritance tax rates can always be expressed in terms of aggregate earnings and bequest elasticities with respect to tax rates, distributional parameters, and social preferences for redistribution. Those results carry over with tractable modifications to (a) the case with social discounting (instead of steady-state welfare maximization), (b) the case with partly accidental bequests, (c) the standard Barro-Becker dynastic model. The optimal tax rate is positive and quantitatively large if the elasticity of bequests to the tax rate is low, bequest concentration is high, and society cares mostly about those receiving little inheritance. We propose a calibration using micro-data for France and the United States. We find that, for realistic parameters, the optimal inheritance tax rate might be as large as 50%-60%–or even higher for top bequests, in line with historical experience.

Fruit de quinze ans de recherches, cette étude, la plus ambitieuse jamais entreprise sur cette question, s’appuie sur des données historiques et comparatives bien plus vastes que tous les travaux antérieurs. Parcourant trois siècles et plus de vingt pays, elle renouvelle entièrement notre compréhension de la dynamique du capitalisme en situant sa contradiction fondamentale dans le rapport entre la croissance économique et le rendement du capital.

This paper conceptualizes intergenerational occupational mobility between the farm and non-farm sectors in five African countries, measures it using nationally representative household survey data, and analyzes its determinants through a comparative method based on pooled logit regressions. We first analyze intergenerational gross mobility. Until the end of the 1980s, intergenerational flows toward the non-farm sector are high in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, flows toward the farm sector are more often observed in Ghana and Uganda, and Madagascar displays less mobility in either direction. The pace of change in occupational structures and the magnitude of labor income dualism between the farm and non-farm sectors appear to explain those differences. We then net out structural change across generations and establish the first measurement of intergenerational net mobility in those five African countries. Ghana and Uganda stand out as relatively more fluid societies. Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea come next while Madagascar shows a particularly high reproduction of occupations. Educational mobility accounts for the Madagascar exception to a large extent, but not for the differences between the other countries. Spatial dualism of employment, i.e. the geographic segregation of farm and non-farm jobs, accounts for most of those remaining differences. We argue that the main determinants of intergenerational mobility, namely income and employment dualisms, likely reflect a historical legacy of different colonial administrations.

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Best-seller incontournable, le livre de Frederic Mishkin présente une analyse économique des systèmes financiers au sein desquels les banques centrales conduisent la politique monétaire de leurs pays. Il expose également les fonctions économiques des banques commerciales et des autres intermédiaires financiers, à la fois dans une perspective nationale et internationale. L’ouvrage doit son succès à deux qualités essentielles : un cadre d’analyse unifié s’appuyant sur un petit nombre de principes économiques fondamentaux, exposés en termes simples ; une pédagogie remarquable reposant sur une formalisation simplifiée, avec des tableaux et des schémas explicatifs. Fidèle à la démarche de l’ouvrage original, l’édition francophone a fait l’objet d’un impressionnant travail d’adaptation. Cette 10e édition est l’occasion de développer une analyse comparée des Etats-Unis et de l’Union européenne : cours de change euro-dollar, crise de liquidité, système bancaire français, conflits UE-autorités nationales, évolution de la réglementation et de la supervision ; de simplifier la présentation des stratégies et régimes de politiques monétaires : les aspects internes sont étudiés en partie IV et les aspects internationaux en partie V ; d’approfondir l’étude des crises financières et d’introduire le système bancaire parallèle : le rôle de la titrisation dans l’effondrement du prix des actifs financiers, les sauvetages bancaires, le dégonflement des leviers financiers et la contraction du crédit ; d’expliquer l’action des banques centrales face à la crise économique : leur part de responsabilité, les mesures adoptées et les défis auxquels elles sont confrontées (notamment les autorités monétaires de la zone euro en réaction à la crise bancaire et à la dette) ; de présenter un cadre d’analyse renouvellé par les travaux récents de la nouvelle économie keynésienne : l’impact des décisions de politique monétaire sur l’équilibre macroéconomique. Par ailleurs, toutes les données chiffrées ont été mises à jour afin de proposer au lecteur les informations les plus récentes possibles. Enfin, grâce à quelque 400 questions et problèmes, le lecteur pourra tester ses connaissances et les mettre en pratique.[Source : 4e de couv.]

Ce recueil de chroniques publiées chaque mois dans Libération entre 2005 et 2011 permet aussi de revivre l’actualité économique d’une période riche en rebondissements, profondément marquée par la déflagration économique mondiale, véritable fil conducteur de ces 6 années. (présentation éditeur)

European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to “natural differences” as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in particular in economics, I try to sketch the lines of a research program dedicated to the politics of inequality on the one hand, to political inequalities on the other hand.

We look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 Côte d’Ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers’ children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment, labor, height stature, and morbidity. Using precrisis (1985-88) and postcrisis (1993) data, we propose a difference-in-difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes, whereby we compare children of cocoa-producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village. This causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine. Hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context. We also provide evidence of gender bias against young girls with respect to education and health care. We finally argue that the difference-in-difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects, likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints.

Quatre points de vue étonnamment convergents qui soulignent les transformations radicales de la finance européenne durant les quarante dernières années et les dangers qui en résultent en l’absence d’une prise de conscience et d’une action politique forte.

It is common wisdom that central banks in the postwar (1945–1970s) period were passive bureaucracies constrained by fixed-exchange rates and inflationist fiscal policies. This view is mostly retrospective and informed by US and UK experiences. This book tells a different story. Eric Monnet shows that the Banque de France was at the heart of the postwar financial system and economic planning, and that it contributed to economic growth by both stabilizing inflation and fostering direct lending to priority economic activities. Credit was institutionalized as a social and economic objective. Monetary policy and credit controls were conflated. The thesis provides a historical analysis of the decisions of the Banque de France and the Conseil National du Crédit, a quantitative analysis of the effects of monetary policy and credit allocation, and a formal model of credit controls. It then extends its analysis to the functioning of the Bretton Woods system.

This article sets out to explain why the Paris Bourse was highly successful in the nineteenth century in spite of the supposedly inefficient monopoly of the official market, the Parquet. The literature argues that the official monopoly was sidelined by a free, innovative market known as the Coulisse, but it fails to explain how the Coulisse emerged despite the monopoly and how the two markets persisted alongside each other during the entire century. We provide a detailed history of how these two markets emerged and interacted. The Parquet increasingly developed as a high-end market, providing security, transparency, and effective settlement-delivery to unsophisticated investors trading on the spot market. The Coulisse provided liquidity, immediacy, and opacity to professional investors trading mostly forward. In line with recent theoretical developments, we argue that the juxtaposition of heterogeneous organizations had important virtues for market participants, since it allowed the exchanges to specialize in different investors and services and made the exchanges complementary to each other. We demonstrate our claim by looking at both the formal rules and the actual functioning of the Parquet, drawing on its archives which we have recently classified.

A recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics. Top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid. Hence, aggregate economic growth per capita and Gini inequality indexes are sensitive to excluding or including top incomes. We discuss the estimation methods and issues that arise when constructing top income share series, including income definition and comparability over time and across countries, tax avoidance, and tax evasion. We provide a summary of the key empirical findings. Most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the twentieth century in general due to shocks to top capital incomes during the wars and depression shocks. Top income shares do not recover in the immediate postwar decades. However, over the last thirty years, top income shares have increased substantially in English speaking countries and in India and China but not in continental European countries or Japan. This increase is due in part to an unprecedented surge in top wage incomes. As a result, wage income comprises a larger fraction of top incomes than in the past. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and empirical models that have been proposed to account for the facts and the main questions that remain open.

Dans la plupart des pays développés, les marchés financiers ont connu un essor rapide et important entre les années 1970 et 1990, après une longue période où ils ont occupé une place mineure dans le financement de l’économie. Cette phase n’est pas sans précédent, dans la mesure où le développement de la Bourse au XIXe siècle avait déjà permis l’avènement de marchés financiers puissants. Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet et Angelo Riva montrent toutefois, en se concentrant sur le cas français, que les deux mouvements sont bien distincts : alors que la Bourse d’avant 1914 offrait un cadre public et réglementé pour les échanges de capitaux, la finance contemporaine opère dans des structures de marché de plus en plus opaques, du fait, notamment, de la transnationalisation des investisseurs et de la privatisation des transactions.

Cet article analyse l’histoire de la relation entre les entreprises industrielles et les marchés boursiers au XIXe siècle en France. Il montre que, hormis quelques secteurs requérant des financements initiaux très importants comme les chemins de fer, l’industrie était jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle peu intéressée par la bourse pour y trouver des financements. Elle y vint peu à peu, davantage pour trouver de la liquidité pour ses actions que pour de nouveaux capitaux. L’organisation de la bourse ne la satisfait pas : le Parquet parisien, marché le plus sûr, reste longtemps concentré sur les valeurs très importantes, tandis que les bourses de province sont trop peu actives pour assurer une liquidité minimale ; enfin le marché ” gris ” de la Coulisse parisienne apparaît comme trop risqué aux industriels prudents. Les réformes qui ont lieu à la fin du XIXe siècle, en mettant le marché réglementé au centre de la place financière de Paris, contribuent à attirer les entreprises en leur fournissant un marché à la fois sûr, actif et accueillant.

La fiscalité française est asphyxiée par sa complexité, son manque de transparence et l’accumulation de privilèges pour une minorité de contribuables ultra-riches. Mais on en reste trop souvent, en la matière, à des énoncés aussi vagues que stériles. Ce livre innove en proposant une critique d’ensemble du système fiscal français. Il démontre scientifiquement, pour la première fois, le caractère régressif de l’impôt dans notre pays (ce qui signifie que, tous prélèvements confondus, les taux d’imposition sont plus élevés pour les ménages les plus modestes et s’abaissent pour les plus riches). Pour cette raison, il fera date. Mais cette analyse au scalpel ne se contente pas de mettre au jour l’injustice du système. Elle plaide pour une révolution fiscale, chiffrée et opérationnelle, fondée sur trois principes: équité, progressivité réelle, démocratie. Ce livre contribue de manière décisive à l’édification d’une nouvelle critique sociale et se pose au centre du débat politique pour les années à venir. Pour la première fois dans le monde, un site Internet permet à chacun d’évaluer les propositions des auteurs et de concevoir une réforme www.revolution-fiscale.fr (présentation éditeur)

Cette note méthodologique décrit le fonctionnement de TAXipp, le modèle de micro-simulation de l’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP), dans sa version 0.0. Le modèle TAXipp est un modèle de micro-simulation classique qui simule pour un échantillon représentatif de la population française les impôts et cotisations sociales prélevés sur les ménages et les transferts reçus par ceux-ci. Ce modèle diffère des modèles classiques de micro-simulation par deux aspects importants : d’une part, il incorpore des prélèvements obligatoires souvent mis de côté dans les simulations(taxation indirecte, impôt sur les bénéfices des sociétés, taxes sur les salaires, etc.) ;d’autre part, il propose une décomposition fine du haut de la distribution des revenus (les 10 % les plus hauts revenus) où une forte hétérogénéité domine, tant dans la composition des revenus que dans l’impact des prélèvements obligatoires.TAXipp 0.0 simule le système fiscal et social français pour les années 2005 à 2010.Cette note décrit la constitution de la base principale à partir de diverses données primaires utilisées, les programmes de simulation du système fiscal et social – et en particulier les hypothèses simplificatrices qui ont été faites –, l’utilisation des données agrégées pour le calage macro-économique du modèle et enfin présente le dictionnaire des variables du modèle.

Interview autour de la “World Top Incomes Database

Cet article présente les principales transformations de la monnaie et du crédit au XIXe siècle en France : développement de l’usage des billets de banque et des dépôts bancaires, apparition d’une variété d’institutions bancaires capables de fournir des services différenciés et complexes aux entreprises et aux épargnants, émergence de marchés boursiers sophistiqués. Ces évolutions sont analysées d’abord comme relevant d’une intégration de marchés de plus en plus vastes, en premier lieu à l’échelle nationale. Cette intégration résulte à la fois de la concurrence entre les agents financiers et de la création d’institutions privées ou publiques qui canalisent et organisent celle-ci. Ce processus est néanmoins fréquemment perturbé par les crises spéculatives récurrentes qui sont inséparables de l’innovation financière, et ce d’autant plus que la régulation de la finance reste assurée essentiellement dans l’intérêt de l’État et de la bourgeoisie rentière qui le contrôle de plus en plus.

La crise actuelle partage des caractéristiques importantes avec nombre d’autres, même si elle en diffère sur certains points.

Building on a large sample of elderly French individuals, we evaluate the resources that were available to the old. We find that a considerable percentage of the French population did not have sufficient assets to live off of when aged. We compare the savings behaviors of pensioners and non-pensioners at a time when only a small part of the labor force was entitled to a pension. We show that pensioners were better able to accumulate wealth than were non-pensioners, even when we take into account their occupation and inherited wealth.

This paper divides the population into two groups: the “inheritors” or “rentiers” (whose wealth is smaller than the capitalized value of their inherited wealth, i.e. who consumed more than their labor income during their lifetime); and the “savers” or “self-made men” (whose wealth is larger than the capitalized value of their inherited wealth, i.e. who consumed less than their labor income). Applying this simple theoretical model to a unique micro data set on inheritance and matrimonial property regimes, we find that Paris in 1872-1937 looks like a prototype “rentier society”. Rentiers made about 10% of the population of Parisians but owned 70% of aggregate wealth. Rentier societies thrive when the rate of return on private wealth ris permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate g (say, r=4%-5% vs g=1%-2%). This was the case in the 19th century and early 20th century and is likely to happen again in the 21st century. In such cases top successors, by consuming part of the return to their inherited wealth, can sustain living standards far beyond what labor income alone would permit.

This article attempts to document and account for the long-run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20-25% of national income between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation, growth, and inheritance can fully account for the observed U-shaped pattern and levels. Using this model, we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20-25% of national income by 2050. This corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100%. Our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small, and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate (say, r = 4-5% versus g = 1-2%), which was the case in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century and is likely to happen again in the twenty-first century, then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality. Contrary to a widespread view, modern economic growth did not kill inheritance.

Les réflexions sur les usages de l’économie et sur le rôle des économistes dans la société n’ont cessé d’alimenter les débats sur la régulation économique ou sur l’enseignement de la discipline et ont encore été ravivées suite à la récente crise financière. La question ” à quoi servent les économistes ? ” est alors souvent doublée d’interrogations sur leur responsabilité sociale : en quoi sont-ils responsables des maux de notre société et de l’économie ? Ont-ils failli à leur rôle ou, au contraire, n’ont-ils pas été assez écoutés ?

Survey data reveals that the pace of increase in height stature experienced by successive cohorts born in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana during the late colonial period (1925-1960) is almost as high as the pace observed in France and Great Britain during the period 1875 to 1975, even when correcting for the bias arising from old-age shrinking. By contrast, the early post-colonial period (1960-1985) is characterised by stagnation or even reversion in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. This article argues that the selection effects linked for instance to measuring the height of women rather than men, mothers rather than women, and, most importantly, the interactions between height and mortality, cannot account for these figures. It then disaggregates these national trends by parental background and district of birth, and match individual data with district-level historical data on export crop (cocoa) expansion, urban density and colonial investment in health and education. Finally, it provides evidence that a significant share of the increase in height stature may be related to the early stages of urbanisation and cocoa production.

Theoretical and historical experience suggests a financial centre may either include a single, consolidated and loosely regulated stock exchange attracting all intermediaries and actors, or a variety of exchanges going from strictly regulated to completely unregulated and adapted to the needs of different categories of intermediaries, investors and issuers. Choosing between these two solutions is uneasy because few substantial changes occur at this “meta-regulatory” level. The history of the Paris exchanges provides a good example, since two legal changes in opposite directions occurred in the late 19th century, when Paris was the second financial centre in the world. In 1893, a law threatened the existing two-exchanges equilibrium by diminishing the advantages of the more regulated exchange; in 1898, another law brought them back. We analyse the impact of these two changes on the competition between the exchanges in terms of securities listed, traded volumes and spreads. We conclude competition among exchanges is a delicate matter and efficiency is not always where one would think.

Depuis le déchaînement de la crise, l’organisation des transactions boursières n’a pas vraiment fait l’objet de velléités réformatrices. Pourtant, les opportunités spéculatives comme les risques encourus dépendent aussi de l’organisation des marchés sur lesquels on opère. La directive européenne Marché d’instruments financiers, en vigueur depuis 2007, témoigne d’une foi déraisonnable dans les vertus auto-organisatrices du marché. Elle a conduit à une concurrence telle sur le marché des marchés financiers qu’elle a fragmenté la liquidité et accentué la privatisation des dispositifs d’échange et des transactions. Mobilisant l’histoire financière, nous démontrons pourquoi et comment il faudrait, à l’échelle européenne, confier aux marchés réglementés une mission de service d’intérêt général comparable à celle qu’ils ont assumée par le passé sans cela ait nuit au développement économique : centraliser, traiter et diffuser l’information pré et post négociation qui constitue un bien public.

We have reconstructed a new blue chips (large caps) stock index for France from 1854 to 1998, based on a modern methodology. Our index differs profoundly from earlier indices, and is more consistent with French financial and economic history. We suggest this result casts some doubt on many historical stock indices, such as those used in Dimson, Marsh and Staunton’s Triumph of the Optimists. Investment in French stocks provided a positive real return during the nineteenth century, but a negative one – because of inflation and wars – in the twentieth. Despite this secular negative real performance, stocks proved the best financial asset in the very long run, although with an equity premium lower than in the US.

A rapidly growing area of economic research investigates the top of the income distribution using data from income tax records. This volume brings together studies of top incomes for twelve countries from around the world, including China, India, Japan, Argentina and Indonesia. Together with the first volume, published in 2007, the studies cover twenty two countries. They have a long time span, the earliest data relating to 1875 (for Norway), allowing recent developments to be placed in historical perspective. The volume describes in detail the source data and the methods employed. It will be an invaluable reference source for researchers in the field. Individual country chapters deal with the specific nature of the data for each of the countries, and describe the long-term evolution of top income shares. In the countries as a whole, dramatic changes have taken place at the top of the income distribution. Over the first part of the century, top income shares fell markedly. This largely took the form of a reduction in capital incomes. The different authors examine the impact of the First and Second World Wars, contrasting countries that were and were not engaged. They consider the impact of depressions and banking crises, and pay particular attention to the impact of progressive taxation. In the last 30 years, the shares of top incomes have increased markedly in the US and other Anglo-Saxon countries, reflecting the increased dispersion of earnings. The volume includes statistics on the much-discussed top pay and bonuses, providing a global perspective that discusses important differences between countries such as the lesser increase in Continental Europe. This book, together with volume 1, documents this interesting development and explores the underlying causes. The findings are brought together in a final summary chapter by Atkinson, Piketty and Saez. (présentation éditeur)

This paper attempts to document and account for the long run evolution of inheritance. We find that in a country like France the annual flow of inheritance was about 20%-25% of national income between 1820 and 1910, down to less than 5% in 1950, and back up to about 15% by 2010. A simple theoretical model of wealth accumulation, growth and inheritance can fully account for the observed U-shaped pattern and levels. Using this model, we find that under plausible assumptions the annual bequest flow might reach about 20%-25% of national income by 2050. This corresponds to a capitalized bequest share in total wealth accumulation well above 100%. Our findings illustrate the fact that when the growth rate g is small, and when the rate of return to private wealth r is permanently and substantially larger than the growth rate (say, r=4%-5% vs. g=1%-2%), which was the case in the 19th century and early 20th century and is likely to happen again in the 21st century, then past wealth and inheritance are bound to play a key role for aggregate wealth accumulation and the structure of lifetime inequality. Contrarily to a widely spread view, modern economic growth did not kill inheritance.

We look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 Cote d’Ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers’ children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment, labor, height stature and morbidity. Using pre-crisis (1985-88) and post-crisis (1993) data, we propose a difference-in-difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes, whereby we compare children of cocoa-producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village. This causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine. Hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context. We also argue that the difference-in-difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects, likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints.

This new edition of Roy Jastram’s The Gold Constant has been produced with the support of the World Gold Council. Roy Jastram’s original text has been reproduced with no changes.

In Africa, boundaries delineated during the colonial era now divide young in-dependent states. By applying regression discontinuity designs to a large set of surveys covering the 1986-2001 period, this paper identities many large and significant jumps in welfare at the borders between five West-African countries around Cote d’Ivoire. Border discontinuities mirror the differences between country averages with respect to household income, connection to utilities and education. Country of residence often makes a difference, even if distance to capital city has some attenuating power. The results are consistent with a national integration process that is underway but not yet achieved.

This paper studies the impact of changes in educational opportunities on various definitions of labour market inequalities in Brazil over two decades (1976-96). Using four editions of the nationally representative PNAD survey, we analyze the evolution of overall inequalities and inequalities of opportunity in 40-49 year old males’ earnings. We design and implement semiparametric decompositions of the respective effects of (i) schooling expansion, (ii) changes in the structure of earnings, and (iii) changes in intergenerational educational mobility. Earnings inequalities varied little over the period, with a peak in the late 1980s that can be imputed to hyperinflation. First of all, the decompositions show that changes in the distribution of education contributed to the increase in both overall earnings inequalities and inequalities of opportunity among the oldest generations, before sharply reducing them among the post-WWII cohorts. Secondly, the decrease in returns to education also contributed to equalizing labour market opportunities in the 1988-96 period. Thirdly and lastly, the changes in educational mobility were not large enough to significantly affect earnings inequalities, whereas it is shown that they should play a prominent role in equalizing opportunities in the future.

Best-seller incontournable, le livre de Frederic Mishkin présente une analyse économique des systèmes financiers au sein desquels les banques centrales conduisent la politique monétaire de leurs pays. Il expose également les fonctions économiques des banques commerciales et des autres intermédiaires financiers, dans une perspective nationale et internationale. L’ouvrage doit son succès à deux qualités essentielles : * L’auteur propose un cadre d’analyse unifié s’appuyant sur un petit nombre de principes économiques fondamentaux, exposés en termes simples. * La pédagogie remarquable repose sur une formalisation mathématique simplifiée et s’accompagne systématiquement de tableaux et de schémas explicatifs. L’édition francophone a fait l’objet d’un impressionnant travail d’adaptation. Elle analyse avec précision le fonctionnement des institutions européennes, les outils de la politique monétaire dans l’Union, le système bancaire français, les conflits UE-autorités nationales, l’harmonisation de la réglementation prudentielle dans le marché unique, etc. (présentation éditeur)

Best-seller incontournable, le livre de Frederic Mishkin présente une analyse économique des systèmes financiers au sein desquels les banques centrales conduisent la politique monétaire de leurs pays. Il expose également les fonctions économiques des banques commerciales et des autres intermédiaires financiers, dans une perspective nationale et internationale. L’ouvrage doit son succès à deux qualités essentielles : * L’auteur propose un cadre d’analyse unifié s’appuyant sur un petit nombre de principes économiques fondamentaux, exposés en termes simples. * La pédagogie remarquable repose sur une formalisation mathématique simplifiée et s’accompagne systématiquement de tableaux et de schémas explicatifs. L’édition francophone a fait l’objet d’un impressionnant travail d’adaptation. Elle analyse avec précision le fonctionnement des institutions européennes, les outils de la politique monétaire dans l’Union, le système bancaire français, les conflits UE-autorités nationales, l’harmonisation de la réglementation prudentielle dans le marché unique, etc. (présentation éditeur)

This paper evaluates income tax reforms in China and India. The combination of fast income growth and under-indexed tax schedule in China implies the fraction of the Chinese population subject to income tax has increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1986 to about 20 percent in 2008, while it has stagnated around 2-3 percent in India. Chinese income tax revenues, as a share of GDP, increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1986 to about 1.5 percent in 2005 and 2.5 percent in 2008, while the constant adaptation of exemption levels and income brackets in India have caused them to stagnate around 0.5 percent of GDP.

Depuis les controverses sur les retraites ouvrières dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, la capacité des individus à s’assurer eux-mêmes pour leur vieillesse a fait débat ; hier pour stigmatiser l’imprévoyance de l’ouvrier et lui refuser tout droit à une pension, aujourd’hui pour réclamer la liberté de chacun de constituer son propre pécule pour ses vieux jours. Dès lors, il est légitime de se demander quelle était, réellement, la situation de ceux qui atteignaient la vieillesse dans une période où il n’existait pas, ou peu, de pensions de retraite. Des données patrimoniales individuelles permettent d’estimer quelle fraction de la population disposait des moyens financiers pour vivre sa vieillesse de façon autonome. L’épargne de cycle de vie était très insuffisante pour financer le grand âge durant le XIXe siècle : bien au-delà de la classe ouvrière ou du salariat le moins qualifié, de larges couches de la population française ne possédaient pas un patrimoine suffisant pour vivre, même modestement, une fois arrivées au terme d’une vie de labeur et d’épargne. Surtout, la situation des plus âgés, qui s’améliore continûment durant le XIXe siècle, connaît une brutale dégradation dans les années 1900. Les fortes inégalités d’accès à l’inactivité en fin de vie, entre hommes et femmes ou entre catégories socioprofessionnelles, achèvent de compléter ce tableau d’une crise du financement des vieux jours, au début du XXe siècle.

L’augmentation rapide des inégalités constatée dans la plupart des pays développés depuis 25 ans s’inscrit dans une durée plus longue : en France, les inégalités salariales sont restées globalement stables durant le XXe siècle, alors que les inégalités de capital ont diminué à la suite des guerres et de la crise de 1929, avant d’augmenter récemment. Cependant, le constat sur l’inégalité doit être complété par une analyse de la mobilité. Or, de ce point de vue, les travaux récents montrent que la mobilité en Europe, aussi bien sociale (par catégories professionnelles) qu’en termes de revenus, est proche de celle observée aux États-Unis. L’utilisation d’une base de données historiques françaises, individuelles et familiales, permet d’analyser la mobilité intergénérationnelle du patrimoine au XIXe et au début du XXe siècle. Cette longue période est marquée par des changements structurels importants : industrialisation, extension du salariat, autonomie professionnelle croissante des femmes, ainsi que par des chocs conjoncturels et politiques. La mobilité intergénérationnelle du patrimoine, en se restreignant à la population qui laisse une succession d’une génération à l’autre, est proche de la mobilité en termes de revenus, estimée dans les années récentes. Cependant, cette apparente stabilité va de pair avec une variation au cours du temps: la mobilité diminue pendant la Belle Époque (1895-1913) avant d’augmenter après la Première Guerre mondiale. En outre, se dessine une hétérogénéité entre riches et pauvres : les mécanismes de reproduction sociale se renforcent au sein des petites fortunes, sans doute liés à la transmission du capital éducatif, alors que dans le haut de la distribution, les richesses s’érodent après la Première Guerre mondiale, sous l’action conjointe de la guerre, de l’inflation et de la fiscalité.

Nous nous contenterons de donner quelques éléments de réponse aux questions générales que le lecteur est en droit de se poser à la seule lecture du titre du numéro : non pas ” les institutions “, mais ” qu’en faire ? “.

Although rates of intergenerational mobility are the same in the United States and Europe today, attitudes toward redistribution, which should reflect those rates–at least in part–differ substantially. An examination of the differences in mobility between the United States and France since the middle of the nineteenth century, based on data for both countries that permit a comparison between the socioeconomic status of fathers and that of sons throughout a period of thirty years, demonstrates that the United States was a considerably more mobile economy in the past, though such differences are far from apparent today.

This paper presents series on top shares of income and wealth in Spain using personal income and wealth tax return statistics. Top income shares are highest in the 1930s, fall sharply during the first decade of the Franco dictatorship, then remain stable and low till the 1980s, and have increased since the mid 1990s. The top 0.01% income share in Spain estimated from income tax data is comparable to estimates for the United States and France over the period 1933-1971. Those findings, along with a careful analysis of all published tax statistics, suggest that income tax evasion and avoidance among top income earners in Spain was much less prevalent than previously thought. Wealth concentration has been about stable from 1982 to 2005 as surging real estate prices have benefited the middle class and compensated for a slight increase in financial wealth concentration in the 1990s. We use our wealth series and a simple model to analyze the effects of the wealth tax exemption of stocks for owners-managers introduced in 1994. We show that the reform induced substantial shifting from the taxable to tax exempt status, hence creating efficiency costs.

We analyze a new blue chips (large caps) stock index for France from 1854 to 1998. We detail its methodology and show that it differs profoundly from earlier indices, and that it is more consistent with the French financial and economic history. We suggest this result casts some doubt on many historical stock indices such as those gathered in Dimson, Marsh and Staunton “Triumph of the Optimists”. We also provide some major results: investment in French stocks provided a positive real return during the 19 th century, but a negative one because of inflation and wars in the 20 th . Despite this century of negative real performance, stocks are still the best financial asset for the very long run but, with an equity premium lower than in the US.

Depuis la crise bancaire de 2008, et comme lors des krachs boursiers de 1987 ou de 2001, la crise de 1929 est invoquée par les commentateurs et les banquiers centraux en tant que référence par rapport à laquelle situer leurs actions. Qu’est-ce qui fait de la crise de 1929 l’exemple par excellence de la crise économique ? Chaque génération d’économistes la relit avec un regard nouveau, en y projetant d’abord ses propres débats. Ce livre présente l’histoire de cette crise hors du commun et les clefs de sa compréhension. Il étudie ses origines profondes comme ses causes immédiates, son déroulement complexe et ses conséquences à court et à long terme sur les grandes économies occidentales, sur l’économie mondiale et sur les relations internationales.

This paper analyzes income and earnings concentration in Portugal from a long-run perspective using personal income and wage tax statistics. Our results suggest that income concentration was much higher during the 1930s and early 1940s than it is today. Top income shares estimated from reported incomes deteriorated during the Second World War, even if Portugal did not take active participation in the conflict. However, the magnitude of the drop was less important than in other European countries. The level of concentration between 1950 and 1970 remained relatively high compared to countries such as Spain, France, UK or the United States. The decrease in income concentration, started very moderately at the end of the 1960s and which accelerated after the revolution of 1974, began to be reversed during the first half of the 1980s. During the last fifteen years top income shares have increased steadily. The rise in wage concentration contributed to this process in a significant way. The evidence since 1989 suggests that the level of marginal tax rate at the top has not been the primary determinant of the level of top reported incomes. Marginal rates have stayed constant in a context of growing top shares.

This article presents J.B. Bayle-Mouillard’s 1836 book on debtors’ prison and shows how it represents an interesting step in applied statistical methodology.

This paper, published as the editor’s introduction to a special issue of Histoire et Mesure on bankruptcies, presents a brief state of recent research on the topic and argues for a more comparative and quantitative approach.

Cet article inaugure une nouvelle rubrique d’Histoire & Mesure : ” Classiques de la statistique “. Elle proposera des présentations d’ouvrages anciens, célèbres ou oubliés, dans le double but de contribuer à l’histoire de la statistique et de signaler aux historiens d’aujourd’hui l’existence de gisements de données potentiellement exploitables, en détaillant leur mode de construction, leurs apports potentiels et leurs limites.

La question des faillites et de l’emprisonnement pour dettes fait actuellement l’objet de recherches novatrices à la croisée de l’histoire du droit et de l’histoire économique et sociale. Les meilleurs spécialistes font ici le point. Complétant le numéro 2 de 2007, qui discutait de la mesure de la criminalité et de l’activité judiciaire en se centrant sur la police, la gendarmerie et les tribunaux civils et pénaux, ce nouveau dossier se penche sur la justice commerciale, et en particulier sur les faillites et sur l’emprisonnement pour dettes.

Cet article s’interroge sur l’articulation entre libéralisme politique et régime monétaire à partir de l’analyse des histoires monétaires française et anglaise.

Some statistics are developed within a consistent intellectual, political and administrative project, as was the case of criminal statistics which appeared and developed with criminology during the 19th century, particularly in France and Belgium. We examine the official statistics of civil and commercial justice, and particularly those of bankruptcy, which were created by the same administration as the criminal statistics in the same period (in the 1830s). We show that the statistics were well done, but that they were unable to attract users in spite of an early use by the justice administration as a management device. Neither members of Parliament nor social scientists used them, probably because they weren’t developed in order to answer adequate questions that would have been embedded in a clear and developing scientific framework. This led to a decline of these statistics, in spite of the fact the data they contained provide interesting insights on 19th century’s society and economy.

Population aging in France in the nineteenth century concerned mainly women, as men’s life spans increased only after World War I. The article assesses the impact of this gender-differentiated aging process on wealth distribution, using individual data on bequests collected for the period 1800-1939. Over time, more women died without assets. But those who owned assets were richer. As a result, women’s aging contributed both to a more unequal wealth distribution and to narrowing the gender gap between asset owners.

This paper examines the evolution of wealth distribution in France during the urbanization process of the nineteenth century, based on a comprehensive dataset of individual inheritances. It presents a spatial decomposition between rural and urban areas, distinguishing Paris from other cities. We use a non-parametric approach based on wealth density functions. Changes in the level of wealth explained most of the spatial evolution of wealth during 1820-1939; at the turn of the century however, the effect of urbanization on wealth distribution increased gradually.

We show that when the money demand function used to estimate the size of the shadow economy includes the lagged dependent variable, the need to assume a known initial condition reappears as it was the case in the early monetary methods.

Cet article présente les liens entre développement des marchés et croissance économique. Il examine d’abord comment un certain nombre de préalables idéologiques et politiques ont dû être surmontés pour rendre légaux les principaux instruments financiers et leur échange. Il montre ensuite le rôle moteur des dettes publiques dans l’émergence de marchés organisés de titres dans l’Europe moderne et la dépendance de celle-ci envers une conception libérale de l’Etat inégalement acceptée. Il étudie par la suite les conditions qui ont présidé à l’extension de ces marchés organisés aux titres émis par les entreprises privées. Enfin, il montre comment les marchés financiers, à la fois au sens large et au sens étroit, ont connu au 20e siècle recul puis renaissance.

This paper aims at giving an explanation of the changes in the number of bankruptcies during the second part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We wonder in particular whether changes in bankruptcy law, which are substantial during the period, suffice to explain the rise in the proportion of bankrupted firms. We first describe the main features and changes of French insolvency law and show that they contradict the evolution observed at the aggregate level. We then show that existing statistics, which include a regional dimension, allow for a better test of the impact of legal changes. We show that some legal changes had a significant impact, but not all. We also observe that regional variations in bankruptcies are huge and do not correspond to French economic geography, but may rather be understood as a diffusion process from the Paris Court towards the provinces. The major differences among regions also suggest that, even in a civil law country, the letter the law is much less important than local practices.

Food quality is always acknowledged as a significant factor in everyday lives, and it often appears in some ad-hoc form or another in the study of economics. Its very fuzzyness may account for its ubiquity. Clarification becomes imperative, and this paper inventories shared features of past research to propose a common research agenda. Its premise is that “quality” requires definition, that definition is conventional and thus negotiated, and that institutions both publicize and enforce agreements on its contents. Qualification in all its guises (certification, geographic provenance, industry labels …) and venues (state, private, third-party…) relies on an institutional frame that is all the more necessary as markets collapse when consumer confidence in foods disappears. That is why the arbitrage between public health and market efficiency emerges as a major issue when it comes to the definition of food quality.

Book review about: Christopher Bliss, Avi J. Cohen and G.C. Harcourt (eds), Capital Theory (3 vol.). Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005

This paper presents series on top shares of income in Argentina from 1932 to 2004 based on personal income tax return statistics. Our results suggest that income concentration was higher during the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s than it is today. The recovery of the economy after the Great Depression, favored by the international trade conditions during and after the Second World War, and the visible effects of the peronist policy between 1945 and 1955 generated an inverted U shape in the dynamics of top shares. The peronist redistributive policy, successful and visible, seemed to have proved limited when compared with the central economies. Since then, and after a new upward movement between 1955 and 1959, the top shares seem to have described the U-shape pattern found in the developed English-speaking economies. The levels of concentration in 1953 were very similar to those found in 1997.

This paper provides estimates of federal tax rates by income groups in the United States since 1960, with special emphasis on very top income groups. We include individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes. The progressivity of the U.S. federal tax system at the top of the income distribution has declined dramatically since the 1960s. This dramatic drop in progressivity is due primarily to a drop in corporate taxes and in estate and gift taxes combined with a sharp change in the composition of top incomes away from capital income and toward labor income. The sharp drop in statutory top marginal individual income tax rates has contributed only moderately to the decline in tax progressivity. International comparisons confirm that is it critical to take into account other taxes than the individual income tax to properly assess the extent of overall tax progressivity, both for time trends and for cross-country comparisons. The pattern for the United Kingdom is similar to the U.S. pattern. France had less progressive taxes than the United States or the United Kingdom in 1970 but has experienced an increase in tax progressivity and has now a more progressive tax system than the United States or the United Kingdom.

We show that, because the cost of the war had been so high in France, the size of the French public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible to stabilise immediately after World War I, even on the anti-Keynesian assumption that a stabilisation would have had no negative effects on income. The reason for the immediate postwar inflation was then not mismanaged policy but a wise choice in the French context; nevertheless, a stabilisation was historically possible from early 1924, and it would most likely have benefited not only France but the entire international monetary system.

Cet article se propose d’étudier les fondements philosophiques que donne Sen à sa théorie des capabilités. La notion de capabilité se construit en opposition à l’utilitarisme et dans un rapport critique à la théorie de la justice de Rawls. Elle fait appel au concept de ” relativité par rapport à l’agent “, introduit par Parfit et Nagel, dans le but de dépasser les insuffisances du conséquentialisme, mais prétend également réintégrer l’évaluation des résultats dans l’évaluation morale. Pour éviter le subjectivisme moral et permettre des comparaisons entre individus, Sen s’écarte cependant de la notion de ” relativité par rapport à l’agent ” pour forger celle d’ ” objectivité positionnelle “. Cette dernière notion a donc pour but de fonder une éthique universaliste à partir d’un relativisme descriptif. Toutefois, le caractère très abstrait de la notion de ” position ” pose problème.

Based on a pioneering research programme on the evolution of top incomes, this volume brings together studies from 10 OECD countries. This rapidly growing field of economic research investigates the top segment of the income distribution by using data from income tax records over the past century. As well as describing the source data and methods employed, the authors also discuss the dramatic changes that have occurred at the top of the income scale throughout the 20th century. This fascinating study is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive historic overview of top income distribution over the last century. It looks at why top incomes shares fell markedly in the first half of the 20th century and why, more recently, there has been a striking difference in the top income distribution between continental Europe and English-speaking OECD countries, like the UK, USA, and Australia. Written by the top names in the field, this seminal work provides rich pickings for those with an interest in inequality, development, the economic impact of war, taxation, economic history, and executive compensation.

A widely applied approach to measure the size of the shadow economy, known as the “monetary method” or the “currency approach,” is based on econometric estimates of the demand for money. These estimates are used to get the currency held by economic agents in excess of the amount they need to finance registered transactions. This excess of currency multiplied by the income-velocity of circulation (assumed to be equal in the registered and shadow economies) gives a measure of the hidden GDP. This paper shows that the monetary method only produces coherent estimates if the income-elasticity of the demand for currency is one and suggests a way to correct the estimated size of the shadow economy when such elasticity is not one. The correction is applied to existent measures for different countries.

On pense généralement que l’État-providence redistribue les ressources vers les générations anciennes aux dépens des générations les plus jeunes. Cependant, cette opinion se fonde sur une vision partielle du système de transferts qui se focalise sur les dépenses de vieillesse. Notre article montre que la prise en compte des transferts descendants d’éducation modifie le tableau de la redistribution intergénérationnelle. Les générations nées entre 1910 et 1920, qui ont bénéficié de la mise en place des systèmes de retraites, ont également financé substantiellement l’éducation de leurs enfants. Les générations nées entre 1990 et 2000 vont payer d’importants transferts ascendants à leurs parents mais elles reçoivent un transfert éducatif du même ordre. Au final, les générations nées entre 1950 et 1960 sont les plus mal loties, mais leurs pertes restent mesurées.

This paper presents series on top shares of income and wealth in Spain over the 20th century using personal income and wealth tax return statistics. Top income shares are highest in the 1930s, fall sharply during the first two decades of the Franco dictatorship, and have increased slightly since the 1960s, and especially since the mid-1990s. The top 0.01% income share in Spain estimated from income tax data is comparable to estimates for the United States and France over the period 1933-1971. Those findings, along with a careful analysis of all published tax statistics, suggest that income tax evasion and avoidance among top income earners in Spain before 1980 was much less prevalent than previously thought. Wealth concentration has been about stable from 1982 to 2004 as surging real estate prices have benefited the middle class and compensated for a slight increase in financial wealth concentration in the 1990s. We use our wealth series and a simple conceptual model to analyse the effects of the wealth tax exemption of stocks for ownersmanagers introduced in 1994. We show that the reform induced substantial shifting from the taxable to tax exempt status. This shifting has eroded the wealth tax base substantially and hence the tax exemption has generated large efficiency costs.

In this paper, we try to measure the impact of the changes in French bankruptcy law in the 19th century focusing on the behaviour of economic agents as users of bankruptcy law for the sake of finding the best solution to their economic problems. Debtors used bankruptcy law in order to minimize their debt level when facing difficulties in servicing it, but they had to convince their creditors and/or the courts of their good faith, and faced the adverse effects of bankruptcy on their reputation and on the smooth functioning of their business. Creditors used bankruptcy law in order to force their debtors to pay, if they could. Judges – who in the French system of specialized commercial courts were elected entrepreneurs – applied the law within a specific economic context (both a specific local context and at a specific moment in the business cycle) which could affect them. The first part of the paper presents the evolution of French bankruptcy law during the 19th century in its historical context. The second part briefly describes the theoretical model we use in order to understand the choices facing debtors and creditors in the face of financial distress. The last part proposes some major stylized facts concerning bankruptcies during that period (based on contemporary official statistics) and tries to understand their relationship with the legal evolution described before.

The literature in financial history usually considers London as the only centre of the late 19th century’s financial globalization, and explains it at least in part by the efficient microstructure (organization) of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The LSE is characterized as having been a little regulated market, where entry was easy both for traders and issuers [Michie (1998), Neal (2004), White (2006)]. The LSE microstructure is also considered as the natural and optimal one by much of the theoretical literature on stock markets, which argues that free entry decreases transaction costs and increases both liquidity and diversification, resulting in economies of scale attracting traders, issuers and buyers. Our paper tries to explain why the Paris Bourse was able to be so successful in spite of the supposedly inefficient monopoly and regulations that the State imposed it. We focus on the fact that the Paris market actually included several different market places: the Parquet (the official Bourse, organized by the agents de change), the Coulisse, the Marché libre, and inter-bank direct operations. We argue that this multi-polar organization, was efficient, relying on the specialization it allowed, and the complementarities it helped develop among markets. We incorporate in the discussion the recent theoretical literature that shows that no single market can satisfy the heterogeneous preferences of all issuers and investors, so that a multi-polar organization can be a superior solution. We demonstrate our claim by looking not only at the rules but also at the actual functioning of the Parquet thanks to its archives which we recently classified. These archives also allow us to build new statistical series which permit evaluating the performances of the Parquet during the 19th century: volumes traded, seat prices, transaction costs, and operational risks. If one supposes that the Parquet was the least efficient segment of the Parisian market, this will provide us with a lower bound for the global efficiency of that market, which should be compared with other markets on similar concrete grounds.

This paper studies the implementation of bankruptcy law in 19th century France. It uses two sources: first, the annual exhaustive statistical appraisal of bankruptcies published from 1840 on; second, individual bankruptcy files conserved at the Paris Merchant Court archives. We show that the changes in bankruptcy law cannot explain the changes in the number and size of bankruptcies, suggesting changes in the practice of the courts as well as in the behaviour of firms. Most importantly, the Parisian example suggests that the courts didn’t treat all firms on the same basis, privileging the important ones. This gives new arguments against a purely legalistic and retrospective vision of the impact of bankruptcy law on economic activity, and in favour of an empirical study of its concrete implementation.

Ce livre est le deuxième d’une série de trois Repères qui ont pour ambition de couvrir les principales questions économiques et sociales contemporaines, à l’échelle nationale, européenne et mondiale. Leur particularité est d’avoir été conçus et écrits par des spécialistes de ces questions – universitaires et chercheurs reconnus – pour des lycéens et des étudiants de premier cycle. Pour cette raison, les textes ici réunis se caractérisent par trois qualités principales : un souci constant de pédagogie, donc de clarté et de lisibilité ; une problématisation qui donne du sens et suscite l’intérêt ; une synthèse de l’état des connaissances scientifiques. Qu’il s’agisse de réussir un exposé ou une dissertation, de préparer efficacement un examen ou de mieux comprendre le monde contemporain, ce manuel de poche devrait satisfaire les exigences d’un large public. (Résumé éditeur)

Manuel organisé en six grandes parties : Introduction ; Les marchés financiers ; Les institutions bancaires et financières ; La banque centrale en action et la conduite de la politique monétaire ; La finance internationale et la politique monétaire ; Macro-économie monétaire

Compared with other European countries, population ageing began particularly early in France. That trend affected both societal organization and family ties. Examining changes in asset ownership by the French between 1820 and 1940 reveals that the proportion of people who died leaving no estate increased, and increased at every age. Taking this dual observation as a starting point, this paper seeks to analyse the strategies employed by older people to survive through old age, utilizing three types of resources: personal economic resources, family resources and state resources. The analysis shows the heterogeneity of this older age group and hence of the survival strategies deployed. Savings are a solution only for a minority; they enable access to other resources and in particular offer an alternative to continued employment. It is also shown that pensions, which were introduced gradually, facilitated more widespread access to savings. Lastly, the growing share of older people in the French population was accompanied by the increasing role of state support.

Stock market indices are today a vital and daily tool for both economists and actors in the financial world. The multiplication and the very importance given to these indices raise the question of their accuracy and of the reliability of the methods that are used to construct them. We begin an investigation on these questions by studying the early history of these indices. We show that stock market indices appeared in the daily press in the United States at the end of the 19th century; that around World War One, they became the focus of the interest of very different groups of people, so that their construction became a more complex and specialized task. The scientific study of indices did not result initially from the stock market’s importance in finance (for firms financing, for savers’ portfolio choices or for investment banks’ decisions), since most of the initial interest came from economists that looked at the stock market only as a measure or an index of the macroeconomic situation. The development of indices dedicated to financial studies came only in the late 1920s, and accelerated only with the birth of modern finance. This article describes the origins of stock-market indices in the interwar period, with an emphasis on France and the United States. It links this evolution with contemporary economic theories, index number theory, financial practices, and the other motivations of their authors. It examines the consequences of the methodological choices that were made and suggests that they had a surprisingly large impact on the results. In particular, we analyse in detail the motivations and technical characteristics of the most important indices that were produced during the interwar period by the French government statistical office (the Statistique générale de la France or SGF). We suggest that these indices cannot be easily compared to most usually discussed indices for other countries and that new calculations are required before international comparisons.

This paper is chapter 13 of a book forthcoming in January 2007 under the title Histoire du marché financier français au 19 ème siècle (a history of the French capital market in the 19th century). In this chapter, we discuss the changes in the supply of securities on the French capital market in the Belle Epoque: the decline of government issues, the rise of a market for private and even manufacturing firms’ issues, the enormous development of foreign issues, both public and private.

This paper is the first chapter of a book forthcoming in January 2007 under the title Histoire du marché financier français au 19ème siècle (a history of the French capital market in the 19th century). He presents broadly the various main elements constituting the long term capital markets, excepting the stock-exchange (which is studied in the next chapter): the banks, the notaries and the network of the Treasury correspondents. We present the transition between the 18th and the 19th centuries and the main changes in the capital markets until the 1840s.

This paper is the first result of a project aiming at understanding the history of bankruptcy law from an empirical economic perspective. By contrast with some proponents of “law and economics” (e.g. La Porta & alii, 1998), we consider that the impact of bankruptcy law on national economic performance cannot be deducted a priori from a simple description of the law, but can only be measured examining actual court practices and economic agents’ behaviour. First of all, we believe that an empirical assessment of bankruptcy must start with a better understanding of what determines the proportions of debtor-creditors relationships which end-up in court (contrasting with those settled outside the courts, see Klapper, 2001). This simple question, which is not usually discussed, is a precondition for any interpretation of aggregate bankruptcy statistics. In this paper, we try to measure the impact of the changes in French bankruptcy law in the XIXth century focusing on the behaviour of economic agents as users of bankruptcy law for the sake of finding the best solution to their economic problems. Debtors used bankruptcy law in order to minimize their debt level when facing difficulties in servicing it, but they had to convince their creditors and/or the courts of their good faith, and faced the adverse effects of bankruptcy on their reputation and on the smooth functioning of their business. Creditors used bankruptcy law in order to force their debtors to pay, if they could. We use a new and still incomplete database constructed using both the yearly official statistics produced by the judicial system from 1830 on, and individual bankruptcy files from the Paris commercial court (Tribunal de commerce) archives in order to measure actual practices. The first part of the paper presents the evolution of French bankruptcy law during the XIXth century in its historical context. The second part briefly describes the theoretical model we use in order to understand the choices facing debtors and creditors in the face of financial distress. The last part proposes some major stylized facts concerning bankruptcies during that period and tries to understand their relationship with the legal evolution described before.

This paper is the eleventh chapter of a book forthcoming in January 2007 under the title Histoire du marché financier français au 19 ème siècle (a history of the French capital market in the 19th century). He discusses the macroeconomics of the great depression of the late 19th century from the point of view of the capital markets. He discusses the thesis of a crowding out of private investment by the government and suggests the organization of financial markets had more responsibility in the misallocation of funds to the most productive uses.

This paper is the seventh chapter of a book forthcoming in January 2007 under the title Histoire du marché financier français au 19 ème siècle (a history of the French capital market in the 19th century). He describes and explains the profound changes undertaken by the banking industry around the mid of the 19th century, and discusses whether they represented an alternative or a complement to the rise of the securities market; it concludes in favour of the second interpretation.

This paper is the fifth chapter of a book forthcoming in January 2007 under the title Histoire du marché financier français au 19 ème siècle (a history of the French capital market in the 19th century). He discusses the reasons for the development of securities in the early 19th century in France. He presents first the economic and legal conditions for the rise of a market for private issues (mostly utilities) and then the development of a market for foreign (mostly government) securities in Paris.