Improving the Measure of the Distribution of Personal Income
AEA Papers and Proceedings
vol. 109,
May 2019
(pp. 302-06)
Abstract
Developing a national account-based measure of the distribution of income from the commonly used census-based concept of money income has been the subject of earlier research. We use publicly available survey and administrative data to construct a distribution of personal income after enhancing the top income distribution in the Current Population Survey (2007 and 2012). We show that inequality measures are fairly sensitive to the definition of income contemporaneously and across time. This work helps bridge the gap between micro data and macro statistics and informs about results from other studies, such as Piketty et al. (2018).Citation
Fixler, Dennis, Marina Gindelsky, and David Johnson. 2019. "Improving the Measure of the Distribution of Personal Income." AEA Papers and Proceedings, 109: 302-06. DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20191037Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- C81 Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data; Data Access
- C82 Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Macroeconomic Data; Data Access
- D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
- D63 Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
- E01 Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts