Emmanuel Saez discusses income and wealth inequality—including the role of technology and globalization, education, government regulations and tax policy—based on evidence gathered by a collective group of researchers in the World Top Incomes Database. The database, which Saez developed jointly with Thomas Piketty, measures income patterns across more than twenty countries. Saez will summarize the key empirical findings, and highlight Canadian data on inequity and the top 1%.
This lecture is the 2014 Gideon Rosenbluth Memorial Lecture, presented by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and UBC's Vancouver School of Economics.
Emmanuel Saez is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Equitable Growth at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on tax policy and inequality both from theoretical and empirical perspectives. Jointly with Thomas Piketty, he has constructed long-run historical data on income inequality in the United States that have been widely discussed in the public debate. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1999, and was awarded the John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association in 2009 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.