Rising inequality: transitory or permanent? New evidence from a U.S. panel of household income 1987-2006

Jason DeBacker (), Bradley Heim, Vasia Panousi () and Ivan Vidangos
Additional contact information
Ivan Vidangos: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/ivan-vidangos.htm

No 2011-60, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: We use a new and large panel dataset of household income to shed light on the permanent versus transitory nature of rising inequality in individual male labor earnings and in total household income, both before and after taxes, in the United States over the period 1987-2006. Due to the quality and the significant size of our dataset, we are able to conduct our analysis using rich and precisely estimated error-components models of income dynamics. Our main specification finds evidence for a quadratic heterogeneous income profiles component and a random walk component in permanent earnings, and for a moving-average component in autoregressive transitory earnings. We find that the increase in inequality over our sample period was entirely permanent for male earnings, and predominantly permanent for household income. We also show that the tax system, though reducing inequality, nonetheless did not materially affect its increasing trend. Furthermore, we compare our model-based findings against those of simpler, non-model based inequality decomposition methods. We show that the results for the trends in the evolution of the permanent and transitory variances are remarkably similar across methods, whereas the results for the shares of those variances in cross-sectional inequality differ widely. Further investigation into the sources of these differences suggests that simpler methods produce erroneous decompositions because they cannot flexibly capture the relative degree of persistence of the transitory component of income.

Keywords: Income; distribution; -; United; States; -; Mathematical; models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201160/201160abs.html (text/html)
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201160/201160pap.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:fip:fedgfe:2011-60

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier ().