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Income Inequality in the United States in the Late 1860s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2015

Mark Stelzner
Mark Stelzner*
Affiliation:
Mark Stelzner is Assistant Professor, Nazarbayev University – Economics, Block 8, 53 Kabanbay Batyr Ave, Astana 010000, Kazakhstan. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

I utilize data from the Civil War income tax to calculate the income shares of the top 1 and 0.1 percent of the population in the United States in the late 1860s—extending Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez's series back in time. As we will see, income inequality during this period represents a low comparable to the late 1970s.

Type
Note
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 889 - 900
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2015 

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Footnotes

I would like to acknowledge Paul Rhode, the two blind reviewers, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez for their helpful comments on the paper.

References

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