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Media type:
E-Book
Title:
Levels and Trends in United States Income and Its Distribution A Crosswalk from Market Income Towards a Comprehensive Haig-Simons Income Approach
Published:
Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 2013
Published in:NBER working paper series ; no. w19110
Extent:
1 Online-Ressource
Language:
English
DOI:
10.3386/w19110
Identifier:
Reproduction note:
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Origination:
Footnote:
Mode of access: World Wide Web
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files
Description:
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, post-transfer cash income of households, while the CBO (2012) uses both data sets and focuses on household size-adjusted comprehensive income of persons, including taxable realized capital gains. This paper provides a crosswalk of income growth across these common income measures using a unified data set. It then uses a more consistent Haig-Simons income definition approach to comprehensive income by incorporating yearly-accrued capital gains to measure yearly changes in wealth rather than focusing solely on the realized taxable capital gains that appear in IRS tax return data. Doing so dramatically reduces the observed growth in income inequality across the distribution, but most especially the rise in top-end income since 1989