Articlebronze2016

Measuring Income and Wealth at the Top Using Administrative and Survey Data

Jesse Bricker · Alice M. Henriques · Jacob Krimmel · John Edward Sabelhaus

203 citations0/0 files storedBrookings Papers on Economic Activity

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

Income, Poverty, and Inequality Economic and Fiscal Studies Labor market dynamics and wage inequality

Abstract

Administrative tax data indicate that U.S. top income and wealth shares are substantial and increasing rapidly (Piketty and Saez 2003, Saez and Zucman 2014).A key reason for using administrative data to measure top shares is to overcome the under-representation of families at the very top that plagues most household surveys.However, using tax records alone restricts the unit of analysis for measuring economic resources, limits the concepts of income and wealth being measured, and imposes a rigid correlation between income and wealth.The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) solves the under-representation problem by combining administrative and survey data (Bricker et al, 2014).Administrative records are used to select the SCF sample and verify that high-end families are appropriately represented, and the survey is designed to measure comprehensive concepts of income and wealth at the family level.The SCF shows high and rising top income and wealth shares, as in the administrative tax data.However, unadjusted, the levels and growth based on administrative tax data alone appear to be substantially larger.By constraining the SCF to be conceptually comparable, we reconcile the differences, and show the extent to which restrictions and rigidities needed to estimate top income and wealth shares in the administrative data bias up levels and growth rates.

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 203 citations exist upstream.

References

2014Capital in the Twenty-First Century 2003Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998 2015The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future 2011Top Incomes in the Long Run of History 1964Cours d'économie politique 2016Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data *2010Fault lines: how hidden fractures still threaten the world economy 1993An Introduction to the TAXSIM Model

Cited by

2023Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends 2018Inheritance and wealth inequality: Evidence from population registers 2019Are Disappearing Employer Pensions Contributing to Rising Wealth Inequality?2020Earnings Risk in the Household: Evidence from Millions of US Tax Returns 2019Trends in household portfolio composition 2020Social Security Wealth, Inequality, and Lifecycle Saving

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.