Levels and Trends in United States Income and Its Distribution A Crosswalk from Market Income Towards a Comprehensive Haig-Simons Income Approach

Philip Armour, Richard Burkhauser and Jeff Larrimore

No 19110, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: 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.

JEL-codes: C81 D31 H24 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-ltv and nep-pbe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as Levels and Trends in U.S. Income and its Distribution: A Crosswalk from Market Income towards a Comprehensive Haig-Simons Income Approach Philip Armour1, Richard V. Burkhauser2,* andJeff Larrimore3 Southern Economic Journal Volume 81, Issue 2, pages 271–293, October 2014

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