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Emmanuel Saez (born November 26, 1972) is a French-American Economics who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His work, done with French economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, includes tracking the incomes of the poor, middle class and rich around the world. Their work shows that top earners in the United States have taken an increasingly larger share of overall income over the last three decades, with almost as much inequality as before the Great Depression. He recommends much higher marginal tax rates, of up to 70% or 90%. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2009, a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in 2010, and an honorary degree from Harvard University in 2019.
/ref> France's most prestigious engineering school and 16th for École Normale Supérieure
/ref>; he ultimately chose the latter. He was in the same class as 2010
/ref>. He graduated in mathematics in 1996. He studied economics at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris.
He then received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999.
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Saez's research on wealth and income inequality has largely focused on households at the top of the wealth and income distributions, which make up a significant portion of the US tax base.
Conservative critics, such as James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, say that Saez and Piketty measure "market income," the total income before tax excluding income from government. Saez describes it as gross income reported on tax returns before any deductions. This excludes unemployment insurance, welfare payments, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and employer-provided health insurance. Saez says that these are the best data available, as measured consistently since 1913. Critics say that they exaggerate inequality.
In 2011, Saez and Peter Diamond argued in public media a widely discussed paper that the proper marginal tax rate for North Atlantic societies and especially the United States to impose is 73% (substantially higher than the current 42.5% top US marginal tax rate).
Together with Raj Chetty and others he researched social mobility in the US. They found substantial geographic differences across the country that were correlated with five factors: segregation, income inequality, local school quality, social capital, and family structure.
"Saez's work attacks policy questions from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, on the one hand refining the theory in ways that link the characteristics of optimal policy to measurable aspects of the economy and of behavior, while on the other hand undertaking careful and creative empirical studies designed to fill the gaps in measurement identified by the theory. Through a collection of interrelated papers, he has brought the theory of taxation closer to practical policy making, and has helped to lead a resurgence of academic interest in taxation."
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