Danny Yagan

Overview

Danny Yagan is an economist identified by Middlegarchs are the new Oligarchs as a coauthor of research on private-business owners, taxation, and top incomes.

Current Profile

The episode presents Yagan as part of the Eric Zwick-Owen Zidar research team that used linked tax records to reveal a large, previously less visible private-business contribution to income concentration. The work underlies the episode’s distinction between celebrity billionaires and a much broader wealthy-owner class.

Key Characteristics

• Researcher using administrative tax data to study private business and inequality.
• Coauthor of the episode’s foundational pass-through-business analysis.
• Contributor to a view of top-income growth that reaches beyond public corporations and finance.

Evidence

Research role:

• Middlegarchs are the new Oligarchs names Yagan alongside Zwick and Zidar in the Treasury-linked project connecting private businesses to owners.

Distributional contribution:

• Middlegarchs are the new Oligarchs uses the team’s results to argue that pass-through businesses explain a large share of analyzed top-income growth.

Qualifications

The source summarizes the research for a general audience and does not independently resolve every measurement or causal question raised by its findings.

What Changed

• Created the profile around the episode’s private-business and top-income research.

Relationships

• Eric Zwick - Co-researcher and episode interview subject.
• Owen Zidar - Co-researcher on the linked tax-record analysis.
• Pass-Through Business Tax Advantage - Institutional tax context for the team’s findings.
• Dispersed Business-Elite Power - Political implications the episode develops from the wealth evidence.