Journal Article

Recent trends in top income shares in the United State: reconciling estimates from March CPS and IRS tax return data

Authors

Publication date

May 2012

Summary

Although most U.S. income inequality research is based on public use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax return data reports substantially faster inequality growth for recent years. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled when the income distribution and inequality are defined the same way. Using internal CPS data for 1967 to 2006, we show that CPS-based estimates of top income shares are similar to IRS data-based estimates reported by Piketty and Saez (2003). Our results imply that income inequality changes since 1993 are largely driven by changes in incomes of the top 1%.

Published in

Review of Economics and Statistics

Volume and page numbers

94 , 371 -388

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00200

ISSN

16

Links

http://serlib0.essex.ac.uk/record=b1588265~S5

Notes

Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to Univ. Essex registered users*

Related publications

1. Recent trends in top income shares in the USA: reconciling estimates from March CPS and IRS tax return data

   Richard V. Burkhauser, Shuaizhang Feng, Stephen P. Jenkins, et al.

   Research Paper, IZA Discussion Papers, 4426 - 2009

2. Recent trends in top income shares in the USA: reconciling estimates from March CPS and IRS tax return data

   Richard V. Burkhauser, Shuaizhang Feng, Stephen P. Jenkins, et al.

   Research Paper, NBER Working Paper Series, 15320 - 2009

3. Recent trends in top income shares in the USA: reconciling estimates from March CPS and IRS tax return data

   Richard V. Burkhauser, Shuaizhang Feng, Stephen P. Jenkins, et al.

   ISER Working Paper Series, 2009-27 - 14 Sep 2009 - download  

#520698