This thesis consists of four separate chapters which address different aspects of inequality and income determination. The first three chapters are country-level studies which examine (1) how incomes are shaped by spatial price differences, (2) the factor income composition, and (3) enterprise size. The final chapter analyses how income inequality changed at the global level. The first chapter investigates the implications of regional price differences for earnings differentials and inequality in Germany. I combine a district-level price index with administrative earnings data from social security records. Prices have a strong equalising effect on district average wages in West Germany, but a weaker effect in East Germany and at the national level. The change in overall inequality as a result of regional price differences is small (although significant in many cases), because inequality is mostly explained by differences within rather than between districts. The second chapter is motivated by the rapid increase in top income shares in the United States since the 1980s. Using data derived from tax filings, I show that this pattern is very similar after controlling for changes in tax unit size. Over the same period as top income shares increased, the composition of these incomes changed dramatically, with the labour share rising. Using a non-parametric copula framework, I show that incomes from labour and capital have become more closely associated at the top. This association is asymmetric such that top wage earners are more likely to also receive high capital incomes, compared with top capital income recipients receiving high wages. In the third chapter, I investigate the positive cross-sectional relationship between enterprise size and earnings using panel data from Ghana. I find evidence for a significant firm size effect in matched firm-worker data and a labour force panel, even after controlling for individual fixed effects. The size effect in self-employment is stronger in the cross-section, but it is driven by individual time-invariant characteristics. The final chapter studies the global interpersonal income distribution using a newly constructed and improved database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008. The chapter finds that the global Gini remains high and approximately unchanged at around 0.7. However, this hides a substantial change in the global distribution from a twin-peaked distribution in 1988 into a single-peaked one now. Furthermore, the regional composition of the global distribution changed, as China graduated from the bottom ranks. As a result of the growth in Asia, the poorest quantiles of the global distribution are now largely from Sub-Saharan Africa. By exploiting the panel dimension of the dataset, the analysis shows which decile-groups within countries have benefitted most over this 20-year period. In addition, the chapter presents a preliminary assessment of how estimates of global inequality are affected by the likely underreporting of top incomes in surveys.

Le 1er chapitre présente une série de 50 ans sur les hauts revenus chiliens basée sur des données fiscales et comptes nationaux. L’étude contredit les enquêtes, selon lesquelles les inégalités diminuent les 25 dernières années. Au contraire, elles changent de direction à partir de 2000. Le Chili est parmi les pays les plus inégalitaires de l’OCDE et l’Amérique latine. Le 2ème chapitre mesure la sous-estimation des revenus factoriels dans les données distributives. Les ménages ne reçoivent que 50% des revenus du capital brut, par opposition aux firmes. L’hétérogénéité des taux de réponse et autres problèmes font que les enquêtes ne capturent que 20% de ceux-ci, contre 70% du revenu du travail. Cela sous-estime l’inégalité,dont les estimations deviennent insensibles à la "capital share" et sa distribution. Je formalise à partir d’identités comptables pour ensuite calculer des effets marginaux et contributions aux variations d’inégalité. Le 3ème chapitre présente une méthode pour ajuster les enquêtes. Celles-ci capturent souvent mal le sommet de la distribution. La méthode présente plusieurs avantages par rapport aux options précédentes : elle est compatible avec les méthodes de calibration standard ; elle a des fondements probabilistes explicites et préserve la continuité des fonctions de densité ; elle offre une option pour surmonter les limites des supports d’enquête bornées; et elle préserve la structure de micro données en préservant la représentativité des variables sociodémographiques. Notre procédure est illustrée par des applications dans cinq pays, couvrant à la fois des contextes développés et moins développés. / The 1st chapter presents historical series of Chilean top income shares over a period of half a century, mostly using data from tax statistics and national accounts. The study contradicts evidence based on survey data, according to which inequality has fallen constantly over the past 25 years. Rather, it changes direction, increasing from around the year 2000. Chile ranks as one of the most unequal countries among both OECD and Latin American countries over the whole period of study. The 2nd chapter measures the underestimation of factor income in distributive data. I find that households receive only half of national gross capital income,as opposed to corporations. Due to heterogeneous non-response and misreporting, Surveys only capture 20% of it, vs. 70% of labor income. This understates inequality estimates, which become insensitive to the capital share and its distribution. I formalize this system based on accounting identities. I then compute marginal effects and contributions to changes in fractile shares. The 3rd chapter, presents a method to adjust surveys. These generally fail to capturethe top of the income distribution. It has several advantages over previous ones: it is consistent with standard survey calibration methods; it has explicit probabilistic foundations and preserves the continuity of density functions; it provides an option to overcome the limitations of bounded survey-supports; and it preserves the microdata structure of the survey.