during this time highly skilled workers have reaped disproportionately higher benefits from shifts in labour demand due to both greater financial and trade integration and technological progress top incomes have responded to the more global market for talent and a growing use of performancerelated pay benefitting top executives and finance professionals in particular policy changes that reduced marginal tax rates in many oecd countries in the s for example directly increased inequality by increasing the amount of disposable income available to the upper percentiles of the distribution at the same time reductions in marginal tax rates may also have indirectly encouraged behavioural increases in labour supply further increasing the earnings of highincome individuals oecd forthcoming