Thomas Piketty

Why organisations work with Thomas Piketty

• He owns the primary dataset. The World Inequality Database, which he co-directs from the Paris School of Economics, is the reference series most finance ministries and international institutions cite when modelling distribution.
• His arguments have moved policy. Capital in the Twenty-First Century reset the global conversation on wealth taxation, inheritance and progressive capital rules at the OECD, EU and G20 level.
• He works at a 250-year time horizon. Boards modelling political risk, sovereign debt sustainability or long-run capital returns get a frame that goes well beyond standard cycle analysis.
• He is independent of national political circuits. He declined the French Legion d’Honneur in 2015, and his credibility with European, US and emerging-market audiences rests on that distance from government.
• A senior buyer gets an economist who has both the academic standing (EHESS, PSE, LSE) and the public reach to engage a leadership team on inequality without flattening it into a slogan.

Biography highlights

• Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Paris School of Economics.
• Centennial Professor at the LSE International Inequalities Institute since 2015.
• Co-director of the World Inequality Lab and the World Inequality Database.
• Author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Capital and Ideology, and A Brief History of Equality, all published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Recipient of the Yrjo Jahnsson Award (2013) and the British Academy Medal (2014).
• Delivered the Ellen McArthur Lectures at the University of Cambridge Faculty of History in 2025.

Biography

The distribution of wealth is not a side-effect of growth. It is now the variable that shapes tax design, capital controls and the political tolerance for global business. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2014, made that case with 250 years of historical data and forced finance ministries, central banks and large investors to take inequality seriously as a risk factor.

The author of that book runs the dataset behind the argument. The World Inequality Database, co-directed from the Paris School of Economics, is the reference series for income and wealth concentration used by the OECD, the European Commission and the IMF. Capital and Ideology in 2020 extended the analysis into a comparative history of inequality regimes, and A Brief History of Equality in 2022 distilled the argument into policy terms.

His institutional base is unusual. He holds chairs at EHESS and the Paris School of Economics, is Centennial Professor at the LSE International Inequalities Institute, and taught earlier as an assistant professor at MIT. He declined the Legion d’Honneur in 2015, on the grounds that it was not the state’s role to decide who is honourable.

For a senior audience, the value is direct. He gives boards a way to read inequality as a structural input into long-run capital allocation, regulatory exposure and political risk, drawn from the empirical work that has reshaped how governments think about taxation since 2014.

Key speaking topics

• Income and wealth inequality
• Taxation and capital regulation
• Long-run capital returns and political risk
• The future of progressive taxation and inheritance
• Inequality in Europe, the US and emerging markets
• Macroeconomic policy and redistribution
• Globalisation, trade and capital mobility

Ideal for

• Boards and investment committees price long-run political and policy risk into capital allocation.
• CFOs, heads of tax and group treasurers tracking the direction of corporate, capital and inheritance tax regimes.
• CEOs and strategy heads at multinational firms are exposed to shifting regulations on wealth, labour share and globalisation.
• Senior teams in banks, asset managers and sovereign investors that need a serious empirical frame on inequality.

Audience outcomes

• A clear read of where wealth concentration is heading in major economies and what that implies for tax and regulation.
• A 250-year frame on capital returns, growth and inequality that sharpens long-horizon strategic decisions.
• A working understanding of the policy proposals (progressive capital tax, inheritance reform, tax transparency) under serious discussion at the OECD and EU.
• An independent academic perspective on the political conditions for global business, distinct from sell-side commentary.
• A direct exchange with one of the economists whose work is most cited by policymakers shaping the rules companies will operate under.