Income Distribution and Inequality

What are the principal issues on which research on income distribution and inequality focus? How might that focus shift in the immediate future? We examine the standard market-based approaches to theorising on the income distribution and the challenges to this analysis posed by the economics of infor-mation and various types of market failure. We also consider the problems of representing the income distribution in a way that has economic meaning and of comparing distributions in terms of inequality and social welfare. There is also a snapshot view of some of the remarkable empirical developments concerning the income distribution in advanced countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Prepared for the The Elgar Companion to Social Economics. JEL Classi\u85cation: C13, D6