Rising Inequality: Transitory or Persistent? New Evidence from a Panel of U.S. Tax Returns
| Autor: | Ivan Vidangos, Jason DeBacker, Shanthi Ramnath, Bradley T. Heim, Vasia Panousi |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: |
Economics and Econometrics
Labour economics Inequality Earnings inequality tax returns labor income taxes media_common.quotation_subject Gross income General Business Management and Accounting Income inequality metrics Economic inequality Income distribution State income tax Economics Household income media_common |
| Zdroj: | Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. 2013:67-142 |
| ISSN: | 1533-4465 |
| DOI: | 10.1353/eca.2013.0004 |
| Popis: | We use a new, large, and confidential panel of tax returns to study the persistent-versus-transitory nature of rising inequality in male labor earnings and in total household income, both before and after taxes, in the United States over the period 1987-2009. We apply various statistical decomposition methods that allow for different ways of characterizing persistent and transitory income components. For male labor earnings, we find that the entire increase in cross-sectional inequality over our sample period was driven by an increase in the dispersion of the persistent component of earnings. For total household income, we find that most of the increase in inequality reflects an increase in the dispersion of the persistent income component, but the transitory component also appears to have played some role. We also show that the tax system partly mitigated the increase in income inequality, but not sufficiently to alter its broadly increasing trend over the period. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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