Disslbacher Franziska, Ertl Michael, List Emanuel, Mokre Patrick and Schnetzer Matthias (2021): On Top of the Top – Adjusting wealth distributions using national rich lists. INEQ Working Paper Series, 20. WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna.

Abstract
Poor coverage of the top in wealth surveys conceals the extent of wealth inequality. The literature mitigates this shortcoming by enriching survey data with rich lists and estimating the top tail with a Pareto distribution. However, recent studies rely on ad-hoc assumptions for some of the required parameters. We suggest a unified regression approach to estimate all parameters of a Pareto distribution jointly and extend our analysis with a more flexible three-parameter Generalized Pareto estimation. We introduce a new database of national rich lists (ERLDB) as an alternative to commonly used global rich lists to combine with survey data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS 2017). Our findings for 14 European countries show that wealth is more concentrated than surveys suggest, with almost doubling Top 1% shares in the most extreme cases. In contrast, countries with successful oversampling strategies tend to experience only minor changes in inequality metrics.

Mokre Patrick (2021): The Quantile Impacts of Real Competition on Industrial Wage Inequality in the United States, 1998-2018. Accepted the Ninth ECINEQ Meeting, July 8-10 2021, ECINEQ The Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.

Abstract
Competition between firms has a substantial impact on wage inequality between workers. The classical political economics literature proposes that turbulent dynamics of real competition within and between industries provide the framework for wage bargaining between workers and firms. Practial limits to wage growth are given turbulently equalizing (incremental profit rates and within-industry cost differentials) and persistently different factors (capital intensity and share of labor cost in total cost). The former provide the link between competition and wage growth, while the latter are responsible for persistent industrial wage premiums. We combine employee level data from the CPS and industry level data from BEA industry accounts from 1998-2018 and find that these impacts are substantial and of unambiguous signs but differential magnitude between income quantiles in those industries where both incremental profit rates and wage growth participate in turbulent equalization.