Recent Trends in Top Income Shares in the United States: Reconciling Estimates from March CPS and IRS Tax Return Data

Richard V. Burkhauser · Shuaizhang Feng · Stephen P. Jenkins · Jeff Larrimore

221 citations0/0 files storedThe Review of Economics and Statistics

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

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Income, Poverty, and Inequality Labor market dynamics and wage inequality Economic Theory and Policy

Abstract

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%.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 221 citations exist upstream.

References

2003Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998 2011Top Incomes in the Long Run of History 1992U.S. Earnings Levels and Earnings Inequality: A Review of Recent Trends and Proposed Explanations 1997Cross-National Comparisons of Earnings and Income Inequality 2011The Oxford Handbook of Economic Inequality 1991Taxes and Business Strategy: A Planning Approach 2001Promise and Pitfalls in the Use of “Secondary” Data-Sets: Income Inequality in OECD Countries as a Case Study 1995Income distribution in OECD countries: evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study

Cited by

2016Measuring Income and Wealth at the Top Using Administrative and Survey Data 2014Recent Trends in Inequality and Poverty in Developing Countries 2014The One Percent 2016Pareto Models, Top Incomes and Recent Trends in UK Income Inequality 2018Trouble in the Tails? What We Know about Earnings Nonresponse 30 Years after Lillard, Smith, and Welch 2015

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

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