We acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme, ERC Grant Agreement n. 340831. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme, ERC Grant Agreement n. 340831. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We construct the first consistent series on the long-term distribution of income in Poland by combining tax, household survey and national accounts data. We document a U-shaped evolution of inequalities from the end of the nineteenth century until today: (1) inequality was high before WWII; (2) abruptly fell after the introduction of communism in 1947 and stagnated at low levels during the whole communist period; (3) experienced a sharp rise with the return to capitalism in 1989. We find that official survey-based measures strongly under-estimate the rise in inequality since 1989. Our results highlight the prominent role of capital income in driving the U-shaped evolution of top income shares. The unique inequality history of Poland speaks to the central role of institutions and policies in shaping inequality in the long run.

Economic and social transformation of China during the past 40 years is without precedent in human history. While the economic transformation was extensively studied, social transformation was not. In this paper, we use for the first time harmonized household surveys covering the period 1988-2013 to study the changes in the characteristics the richest 5 percent of China's urban population. We find that the elite changed from being composed of high government officials, clerical staff, and workers in 1988 to professionals and small and large business owners in 2013. The educational level of the elite increased substantially. Membership in CCP has a positive (albeit small) effect on one's income but is particularly valuable to large business owners.

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth, and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China and Russia over the 1978-2015 period. We contrast the different privatization strategies implemented in the two countries and observe their impacts on the evolution of inequality.

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The transformation of China from a poor and egalitarian country to an upper-middle-income country with a level of income inequality greater than in the United States has been the subject of innumerable publications. Chinese transformation is a unique event in world economic history: never have so many people over such a relatively short period of time increased their income so much. China's GDP per capita in 1978, at the time of the initiation of

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