The Distribution of Lifetime Incomes in the United States
Jae Song,
Greg Kaplan and
Fatih Guvenen
Additional contact information
Jae Song: Social Security Administration
No 536, 2014 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics
Abstract:
Our investigation reveals four sets of results. First, we find substantial inequality in lifetime earnings, more than double what has been reported in earlier work that relied on much shorter panels and made parametric assumptions. The inequality in lifetime earnings above the median of the distribution alone is comparable to or larger than the total inequality found in earlier work. Second, contrary to some previous papers, we find that most of the rise in cross-sectional income inequality did not get translated into a rise in lifetime inequality. Third we also characterize the gender lifetime inequality gap and racial income gap for lifetime incomes. We find remarkable similarities across the lifetime inequality among men and among women, especially for cohorts that entered the economy in the last 40 years. Fourth, we quantify the lifetime burden of taxes and compare it to the burden of tax distribution estimated from cross-sectional distribution of income (as commonly done in the literature).
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-pbe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2014/paper_536.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed014:536
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in 2014 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().