Pareto’s Limits: Improving Inequality Estimates in America, 1917 to 1965

I owe a great deal to coauthor Vincent Geloso for this paper. Vincent has written a series of papers that improve the top income share estimates. In 2023 he found my paper on nonparametric density estimation from tabulated summary data and suggested that we apply the method to estimate top income shares from tax returns data. At that time, the literature used Piketty’s Pareto interpolation method, which was ad hoc.