Exercises to Accompany Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press, 2014)

Documents needed for practice exercises will be listed here as they become available.


Chapter 2

The ‘Law Of Cumulated Growth’ — Reproduce Table 2-2:

Hints [xls]

Chapter 7

Graph a Lorenz curve and compute a Gini coefficient:

Instructions [pdf]

Hints [xls]

Code [R]

Chart [pdf]

Chapter 9

Analyze the distribution of top incomes among professional athletes using publicly reported salaries and earnings.

Instructions [pdf]

Hints [xls]

Code [R]

Examples of charts produced by the R code (worst example on the left, best example on the right):

Chart 1 [pdf] ; Chart 2 [pdf] ; Chart 3 [pdf] ; Chart 4 [pdf] ; Chart 5 [pdf] ; Chart 6 [pdf] ; Chart 7 [pdf] ; Chart 8 [pdf] ; Chart 9 [pdf] ; Chart 10 [pdf] ; Chart 11 [pdf] ; Chart 12 [pdf]

Chapter 11

Analyze the distribution of wealth using the Forbes magazine billionaires lists.

Instructions [pdf]

Forbes / 1996 [xls]

Forbes / 2014 [xls]

CPI / United States Dollar Consumer Price Index [xls]

Hints [xls]