Immigration and the top 1 percent

Advani, Arun, Koenig, Felix, Pessina, Lorenzo and Summers, Andrew ORCID: 0000-0002-4978-7743 (2025) Immigration and the top 1 percent. Review of Economics and Statistics, 107 (4). 1123 – 1135. ISSN 0034-6535

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Abstract

Using administrative data on the universe of U.K. taxpayers, we study the contribution of migrants to the rise in U.K. top incomes. We show that migrants are over-represented at the top of the income distribution, with migrants twice as prevalent in the top 0.01% as anywhere in the bottom 97% of taxpayers. These high incomes are predominantly from labor, rather than capital, and migrants are concentrated in only a handful of industries, predominantly finance. All of the observed growth in the U.K. top 1% income share over the past 20 years has accrued to migrants.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Divisions:	Law School
Subjects:	K Law
Date Deposited:	09 Feb 2024 11:24
Last Modified:	29 Aug 2025 16:42
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/121988

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