policymakers demonstrate

Inequality and Welfare: Is Europe Special? 551
heterogeneous. These results, specifically in Northern Europe, could not have
been obtained if people in Europe did not care about inequality. This social
concern is also reflected in the importance of the field in Europe.
12.5 Europe Is at the Forefront of Research on Many Topics
Some empirical evidence is provided by the affiliation of the chapter authors of
the three volumes of the Handbook of Income Distribution, edited by Atkinson
and Bourguignon, which constitutes an invaluable source of information.
60 per cent of the authors report an affiliation in a European University.
50 per cent of the papers submitted or accepted at the Journal of Economic
Inequality were written by scholars of European Universities. Nobody has forgotten
the contribution of European economists to the methodological issues
raised by the measurement of inequality with the initial impulse given at the
end of the 1960s by Antony Atkinson, Serge-Christophe Kolm and Amartya
Sen (who at that time worked in the UK). This was followed by the decomposition
of inequality indices with the work of François Bourguignon, Frank
Cowell and Tony Shorrocks etc.
More recently, the issues of fairness and distributive justice have received
a lot of attention from European economists with leading propositions formulated
by Marc Fleurbaey and François Maniquet (Fleurbaey, 2008, 2009 and
Fleurbaey and Maniquet, 2011), the inventive experimental approach to social
justice of the NHH team (Cappelen et al., 2007, Almås et al., 2010, Cappelen
et al., 2013), just to give a few examples.
The contribution of European economists to empirical issues also cannot be
dismissed and Anthony Atkinson, well before it became fashionable, did much
to expand our knowledge of income distribution for the UK and elsewhere.
Thomas Piketty was a pioneer in the 90s on focusing his research on the upper
tail of the distribution and to realize that the share of the top 1 per cent was
a good ‘sufficient statistics’ in many cases and in particular in the study of
wealth inequality. His work with Emmanuel Saez (Piketty and Saez, 2003) has
received widespread media and web attention. It may not be by chance that the
booming of the pre-tax income share of top 1 per cent (from 9.0 per cent in
1970 to 22.4 per cent by 2012) or the surge of the wealth share of top 0.1 per
cent (from 8 per cent in the mid-1970s to 22 per cent in 2012) was brought into
full view of the economics profession by French economists working in the US
and in France (Saez and Zucman, 2014). Anthony Atkinson did a great deal to
extend the focus of this research all over the world and the construction of the
world top income data base is really a European initiative and is supported by
institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Another field where European economists are on the top of the list is the
study of happiness which is connected to welfare, although, as has been argued
previously, should not be mixed up with it. Even if happiness studies started