Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/181667
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
Working Papers on Capital as Power No. 2018/06
Publisher: 
Forum on Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, s.l.
Abstract: 
This paper offers a new approach to the study of capitalist income. Building on the "capital as power" framework, I propose that capitalists earn their income not from any productive asset, but from the legal right to command a corporate hierarchy. In short, I hypothesize that capitalist income stems from hierarchical power. Based on this thinking, I hypothesize that the capitalist fraction of an individual's income is a gradient function of hierarchical power (which I define as the number of subordinates under one's control). Using data from US CEOs, I find evidence that this is true. Furthermore, a hierarchical model of the United States that generalizes this data accurately reproduces many aspects of the US distribution of capitalist income, including the relation between income size and capitalist income fraction. This evidence suggests that the ownership structure of US society is closely linked to the hierarchical structure of firms. This has important implications for the study of income distribution.
Subjects: 
capitalist income
hierarchy
power
functional income distribution
personal income distribution
inequality
capital as power
JEL: 
D31
D33
B5
URL of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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