Thomas Blanchet
I am an economist working on inequality and public finance. I obtained my Ph.D. from the Paris School of Economics in 2020. I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021–2022, and I am the coordinator for national accounts, statistical tools and methods for the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics.
You can contact me at thomas.blanchet@wid.world. You can also follow me on Twitter at @thomas_blncht.
You can also find some of my work on my RePEc/IDEAS profile, my CitEc profile, and my Google Scholar profile.
Most of the code I write for my work is hosted on GitHub, and you can access it through my GitHub profile. I mostly work with R and Stata, but also occasionally with Python, Java, and C++.
I am an occasional photographer and post some of my work on 500px.
Research Papers
Job Market Paper
Uncovering the Dynamics of the Wealth Distribution
Preliminary draft [coming soon]
Slides [coming soon]
Working Papers
Real-Time Inequality (with Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman)
NBER Working Paper #30229 (July 2022)
Data online at realtimeinequality.org
Replication package: GitHub
Selected press coverage [full coverage]:
Published Papers
Wealth Inequality Dynamics in Europe and the United States: Understanding the Determinants (with Clara Martínez-Toledano), Journal of Monetary Economics [conditionally accepted]
Replication package [coming soon]
Data and updates available on the World Inequality Database
Why Is Europe More Equal than the United States? (with Lucas Chancel and Amory Gethin), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2022, 14 (4): 480-518
Replication package: ICPSR, GitHub [coming soon]
Data and updates available on the World Inequality Database
Selected press coverage:
Le Monde (in French)
The Weight of the Rich: Correcting Surveys with Tax Data (with Ignacio Flores and Marc Morgan), Journal of Economic Inequality, 2022
Stata command bfmcorr available on SSC (type ssc install bfmcorr to install).
Generalized Pareto Curves: Theory and Applications (with Juliette Fournier and Thomas Piketty), Review of Income and Wealth, 2022, 68: 263-288
R package gpinter: available on GitHub
Replication package: available on GitHub
Mathematica notebooks: available on GitHub
Software
Stata command “enforce”
Stata command to enforce arbitrary accounting identities between variables.
Type ssc install enforce in Stata to install.
Stata command “wid”
Stata module to download data from the World Inequality Database.
Type ssc install wid in Stata to install.
R package “wid”
R package to download data from the World Inequality Database.
R package “gpinter”
R package for generalized Pareto interpolation.
Stata command “bfmcorr”
Stata module to implement the survey correction method of Blanchet, Flores and Morgan (2022).
Type ssc install bfmcorr in Stata to install.
Miscellaneous
Distributional National Accounts Guidelines (2021)
I was one of the main coordinators for the latest revision of the Distributional National Accounts Guidelines, the document that establishes the current methodological practices used on wid.world.
Expert Group Report on the Measurement of Inequality and Redistribution
I was co-rapporteur for an official report commanded by the French Statistical Office (INSEE) on the measurement of inequality within the distributional national accounts framework.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Stata guide for style and good practices)
This basic Stata style guide is the first thing that I ask research assistants to read.
It's very much incomplete, but it covers the basics.
Applying Generalized Pareto Curves to Inequality Analysis (2018)
with Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille and Clara Martìnez-Toledano
American Economic Association: Papers & Proceedings, 2018, 108: 114–118
Small paper, companion to Generalized Pareto Curves: Theory and Applications.
Prices and currency conversions in WID.world (2017)
Technical note, targeted at users of wid.world, explaining the different approaches and conventions used to perform price adjustments.
Its content it now mostly subsumed into the latest DINA guidelines.
National Accounts Series Methodology (2016)
with Lucas Chancel
Technical note detailing the methodology used to construct harmonized national income series on wid.world.
Its content it now mostly subsumed into the latest DINA guidelines.
Wealth inequality in Europe and in the United States: estimations from surveys, national accounts and wealth rankings (2016)
Master Thesis, defended at the Paris School of Economics.