7.4.4 Econometric Evidence on Determinants of Top Income Shares
A key objective in the top income project has been to create a sufficiently rich cross-country panel to enable an econometric testing of questions about what determines inequality.144 In this subsection we will report on the results from a number of such studies.
7.4.4.1 Determinants of Inequality: Correlations over the Long Run
Roine et al. (2009) combined top income shares with data on a number of variables that have been suggested to affect inequality. The approach is not to test a particular theory but rather to draw on a large number of models to produce a list of variables of interest in an exploratory fashion (see Atkinson and Brandolini, 2006, for a discussion of the clear ...
