An estimator of inequality in lifetime incomes is derived. It can be computed for a population from the distribution of incomes in one year. As a result, the estimates are as easily calculated as measurements of annual inequality, but can be used as measurements of lifetime inequality. Estimates from this measure and two others have been computed for selected years since 1947. The results are compared by their implications for the level and trend of inequality in the United States.

We investigate how leadership by couples affects the profitability of family firms. Using comprehensive data from Italy, we show that family firms led by married couples perform significantly better than other family firms. This result is robust to several estimation techniques, including matching, instrumental variables and transition analyses. Marital leadership works best when firm operations are complex and knowledge-based, as well as when the firm is subject to agency conflicts due to weak competition and poor legal infrastructure. Studying the mechanisms behind these results, we show that the presence of couples at the top of the firm enhances the willingness to invest during uncertain times, reduces employee turnover, and improves labor productivity.

Although international evidence suggests that families may be unhelpful to firm performance, recent analyses of U.S. public companies indicate that family firms outperform. This study probes these contrasting findings by investigating more fine-grained measures of family business in the U.S. Specifically, it makes a fundamental but neglected distinction between lone founder businesses in which no relatives of a founder are involved, and true family businesses that do include multiple family members as major owners or managers. The research also seeks to overcome issues of endogeneity and selection bias by examining both Fortune 1000 firms and a random sample of 100 much smaller public companies. The results show that findings are indeed highly sensitive both to the way in which family businesses are defined and to the nature of the sample. Fortune 1000 firms that include relatives as owners or managers never outperform in market valuation, even during the first generation. Only businesses with a lone founder outperform. Moreover neither lone founder nor family firms exhibited superior valuations within a randomly drawn sample of companies. Our results confirm the difficulty of attributing superior performance to a particular governance variable.