Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts

Alejandro Badel (), Moira Daly, Mark Huggett and Martin Nybom
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Alejandro Badel: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Georgetown University

No 2017-061, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: We provide a common set of life-cycle earnings statistics based on administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Sweden. We find three qualitative patterns, which are common across countries. First, top-earnings inequality increases over the working lifetime. Second, the extreme right tail of the earnings distribution becomes thicker with age over the working lifetime. Third, top lifetime earners exhibit dramatically higher earnings growth over their working lifetime. Models of top earners should account for these three patterns and, importantly, for how they quantitatively differ across countries.

Keywords: Earnings; Inequality; top earners; top incomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D91 H21 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-pbe
Note: M
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Badel_ ... 2017_top-earners.pdf First version, June 22, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts (2018)
Working Paper: Top earners: cross-country facts (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-061

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