Showing 1 - 10 of 232
Inconsistent censoring of top earnings in the public-use March Current Population Survey (CPS) is an important limitation in using it to measure labor earnings trends. Using less-censored internal CPS data, combined with Pareto estimates from it for internally censored observations, we create an...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796551
Recent research on United States levels and trends in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. Piketty and Saez (2003) examine market income of tax units based on IRS tax return data, DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith (2012) and most CPS-based research uses pre-tax,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796661
Although the vast majority of US research on trends in the inequality of family income is based on public-use March Current Population Survey (CPS) data, a new wave of research based on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return data reports substantially higher levels of inequality and faster...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005059075
robust to the choice of inequality index, whether Gini coefficient or other commonly-used indices. When we compare our best …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005777888
This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011271446
This paper examines the distributional implications of introducing additional means testing of Social Security benefits where proceeds are used to help balance Social Security's finances. Benefits of the top quarter of households ranked according to the relevant measure of means are reduced...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951055
Thomas Piketty's monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century has transported us to a higher understanding of historical movements in inequality. This essay ranks the promise of different paths that scholars can usefully follow from the point to which his book has guided us. The main path to...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951213
The rise in American inequality has been exaggerated both in magnitude and timing. Commentators lament the large gap between the growth rates of real median household income and of private sector productivity. This paper shows that a conceptually consistent measure of this growth gap over 1979...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005088619
A basic tenet of economic science is that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita. But our results raise doubts by creating a direct link between macro productivity growth and the micro evolution of the income distribution. We show that over the entire period...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005089202
Previous studies of recent U.S. trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results, partly because of large sampling errors. By making more efficient use of the available information in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we generate more reliable estimates of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005084935