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Focusing on the advanced political economies, this paper critically reviews the recent scholarship on the evolution of top incomes over the past few decades. The existing literature shows that the determination of top incomes is complex and multifaceted, and is bound up with factors associated with both politics and economics. Technological change and globalization are vital sources of change in contemporary capitalism, but the continued diversity in top income shares across the advanced capitalist world suggests that these forces alone cannot account for the empirical patterns. Instead, there is compelling evidence that power and politics, including government policy, trade union and left party strength, institutions, and financialization, all play a pivotal role in regulating distributive outcomes. It is argued that future research will require a plurality of methodological approaches in order to clarify the complex causal process that drives top-end income concentration.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIn 1887 Henry Carter Adams produced a study demonstrating that the ownership of government bonds was heavily concentrated in the hands of a 'bondholding class' that lent to and, in Adams's view, controlled the government like dominant shareholders control a corporation. The interests of this bondholding class clashed with the interests of the masses, whose burdensome taxes financed the interest payments on government bonds. Since the late nineteenth century there has been plenty of debate about the ownership of the public debt. But the empirical evidence offered to support the various arguments has been scant. As a result, political economists have few answers to questions first raised by Adams over a century ago: how has the pattern of public debt ownership changed? Can we still speak of a powerful 'bondholding class'? Does public debt redistribute income from taxpayers to public creditors? This article develops a new framework to address these questions. Anchored within a 'capital as power' approach, the research indicates a staggering pattern of concentration in the ownership of US public debt in the hands of the top one per cent of US households over the past three decades. Accordingly, the bondholding class is still alive and well in contemporary US capitalism.

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This article examines the role of the Big Three asset management firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – in corporate environmental governance. Specifically, it investigates the Big Three’s relationships with the publicly listed Carbon Majors: a small group of fossil fuels, cement and mining companies responsible for the bulk of industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Engaging with the corporate governance concepts of ownership and control, and exit and voice, it charts the rise to prominence of the Big Three, including their environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds, in the ownership of the Carbon Majors. Having established their status as key sources of permanent capital that are unlikely to exit from their investment positions in the world’s most polluting publicly listed corporations, the article examines how control may be exercised through voice by analysing the Big Three’s proxy voting record at Carbon Major annual general meetings. It finds that they more frequently oppose rather than support shareholder resolutions aimed at improving environmental governance and that their voting is more likely to lead to the failure than to the success of these resolutions. Remarkably, there is little to distinguish the proxy voting of the Big Three’s ESG funds from their non-ESG funds. Regardless of whether these resolutions succeeded or failed, they also tend to be narrow in scope and piecemeal in nature. Overall, the article raises serious doubts about the Big Three’s credentials as environmental stewards and argues instead that they are little more than stewards of the status quo of shareholder value maximization.