Top income share estimates based only on individual tax returns (Piketty and Saez, 2003) are biased by tax-base changes, major social changes, and missing income sources. Addressing these issues requires numerous assumptions, especially for broadening income beyond that reported on tax returns. This paper shows the effects of adjusting for technical tax issues and the sensitivity to alternative assumptions for distributing missing income sources. Our estimates of the distribution of national income suggest that since 1980 top income shares are lower and have increased less than other tax-based studies. Since the early 1960s, increasing government transfers and tax progressivity have resulted in little change in after-tax top income shares. data Views and opinions expressed are of the and do official Treasury or policy. This paper embodies the of the Joint Committee on but as members of both and both houses of the Joint Committee

Income Inequality in the United States: Using Tax Data to Measure Long-Term Trends

Income Inequality Measures and Economic Growth Channels

This paper combines historical cross-sectional and longitudinal income and wealth data in the United States to present the evolution of absolute intragenerational mobility from the 1960s onward. That is, the fraction of families with higher income or wealth over a given period. We find that the rates of absolute mobility over periods of two to four years are largely confined within 45%-55%. This occurs over all the phases of the business cycle. Absolute mobility is higher for lower percentiles, also during periods of increasing inequality. These results stem from the importance of the changes in the composition of income and wealth percentiles even over short time periods. We offer a simplified model to mathematically describe these findings.

Inclusive Growth and Absolute Intragenerational Mobility in the United States, 1962-2014

This paper investigates inequality and intragenerational economic mobility among formal workers in a developing country with large inequality. Understanding economic mobility is important because it shapes our perception of inequality. Despite its significance, evidence on intragenerational mobility, especially that based on administrative data, is relatively limited in developing countries. Using Thailand’s tax return data, we study the evolution of earnings inequality, estimate medium-term earnings mobility, and examine the heterogeneity of mobility across age, gender and employment arrangement. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, annual earnings inequality rises during the 2009-2018 period. We find that the inequality is largely permanent, and its increase is primarily driven by top-earnings workers. Second, medium-term mobility tends to be limited at both ends of the earnings distribution, with particularly pronounced persistence observed at the top decile. Our suggestive comparison indicates that Thailand’s earnings mobility is among the lowest in the pool of evidence from both developed and developing countries. Third, there is a considerable heterogeneity in mobility regarding employment arrangement. Workers in less-formal jobs have much lower upward mobility than those in more-formal employment. Our findings also indicate significant heterogeneity in mobility with respect to gender and age. 

Climbing the economic ladder: Earnings inequality and intragenerational mobility among Thai formal workers

The question of who benefits from economic growth is usually assessed by using cross section data to calculate changes in income inequality. An alternative is to assess patterns of panel income changes. We derive theoretical conditions reconciling changes in inequality together with various measures of convergent/divergent panel income changes. For a number of inequality indices, as well as for Lorenz curves: we show that rising inequality can coexist with convergent panel changes provided the latter are large (and in the right direction), where the meaning of large varies depending on the particular regression under analysis; we show that it is impossible to have both falling inequality together with divergent panel income changes in shares or in proportions; and we establish a condition linking convergence/divergence in dollars to changes in the coefficient of variation. 

/pdf/inequality-and-panel-income-changes-conditions-for-3bu5p1ok.pdf

Inequality and panel income changes: conditions for possibilities and impossibilities

Income Mobility and Inequality: Adult-Level Measures From the Us Tax Data Since 1979

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Income Mobility and Inequality: Adult-Level Measures From the Us Tax Data Since 1979