An Integrated Approach for Top-Corrected Ginis

Charlotte Bartels and Maria Metzing

No 10573, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the two data sources and develop an integrated approach for top-corrected Gini coefficients where we impute top incomes in survey data using information on top income distribution from tax data. We apply our approach to European EU-SILC survey data which in some countries include administrative data. We find higher inequality in those European countries that exclusively rely (Germany, UK) or have relied (Spain) on interviews for the provision of EU-SILC survey data as compared to countries that use administrative data.

Keywords: Pareto distribution; tax record data; survey data; top income shares; Gini coefficient (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C46 C81 D31 H2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2017-02
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published as 'An integrated approach for a top-corrected income distribution' in: Journal of Economic Inequality, 2019, 17 (2), 125-143

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Related works:
Working Paper: An Integrated Approach for Top-Corrected Ginis (2017)
Working Paper: An integrated approach for top-corrected Ginis (2016)
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