Human Capital Inequality: Empirical Evidence

Wealth inequality has received considerable attention, with mounting evidence of steady and economically meaningful changes in the concentration of wealth ownership. By definition, wealth inequality captures disparity in the ownership of productive capital and other non-labor factors of production. In contrast, in this article we focus on the distribution of human capital and its implications for the accrual of economic resources to individuals and households. Human capital inequality can be thought of as measuring disparity in the ownership of labor factors of production, which are usually compensated in the form of wage income.