Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is a French economist whose work focuses on wealth and income inequality. He is the author of numerous articles published in journals and of a dozen books. He has done major historical and theoretical work on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income and wealth, and political conflict. In particular, Piketty is the initiator of the recent literature on the long-run evolution of top income shares in national income. These works have led to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets and to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution.