Immigration and the Top 1 Percent

Arun Advani; Felix Koenig; Lorenzo Pessina; Andy Summers

doi:10.1162/rest_a_01408

The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 107 No. 4 2025

Immigration and the Top 1 Percent

Arun Advani¹; Felix Koenig²; Lorenzo Pessina³; Andy Summers⁴

¹ University of Warwick and Institute for Fiscal Studies · ² Carnegie Mellon University · ³ ZEW Mannheim · ⁴ London School of Economics

open access

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.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01408
Volume: 107
Issue: 4
Pages: 1123-1135
Language: en
Sources: bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Immigration and the Top 1 Percent

Abstract

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