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Reaction to L. P. Fesenfeld in GAIA 30/3 (2021): Glimmers of hope: A global Green New Deal is feasible A Green New Deal is a necessary and viable tool to halt global heating while reducing socio-economic inequalities. Yet it is important to complement currently feasible designs like a Green New Deal with the removal of the remaining structural barriers to what is necessary in order to limit warming to 1.5 °C. A Green New Deal should focus on reducing energy demand while improving well-being. It needs to scale up public investment, while confronting fossil fuel dependencies and incumbent resistance.

This paper is concerned with the problem of modelling the tail of the wealth distribution with survey data when the data does not adequately cover the tail of the distribution. In order to deal with the problem post data collection, it is standard practice to either fit a Pareto tail to the data or to combine wealth survey data with observations from rich lists before fitting such a Pareto tail. This paper proposes a novel approach (’rank correction’) to address such cases which does not require additional data-sources. Applying the rank correction approach to wealth survey data (HFCS, SCF, WAS) yields estimates of top wealth shares, which are closely in line with estimates from the World Inequality Database and therefore represent a significant improvement over the raw survey data. While the paper focuses on the distribution of wealth as a case in point the rank correction approach might generally prove useful in contexts, where the tail of a Pareto-distributed variable is not adequately covered by the available data.

In this paper, we present results from of a large-scale replication of Hodgson and Rothman's (1999, The Economic Journal, 109(453): 165–186) seminal analysis of the institutional and geographical concentration of authors publishing in top economic journals. We analyze bibliometric data of more than 49,000 articles published in a set of 30 highly influential economic journals between 1990 and 2018. Based on a random sample of 3,253 authors, we further analyze the PhD-granting institutions of the authors under study to better scrutinize the claim of an ‘institutional oligopoly’. The findings confirm the long-term persistence of strong oligopolistic structures in terms of both, author affiliations as well as PhD-granting institutions.