Top Incomes and Inequality Measurement: A Comparative Analysis of Correction Methods Using the EU SILC Data

Vladimir Hlasny and Paolo Verme

Econometrics, 2018, vol. 6, issue 2, 1-21

Abstract: It is sometimes observed and frequently assumed that top incomes in household surveys worldwide are poorly measured and that this problem biases the measurement of income inequality. This paper tests this assumption and compares the performance of reweighting and replacing methods designed to correct inequality measures for top-income biases generated by data issues such as unit or item non-response. Results for the European Union’s Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey indicate that survey response probabilities are negatively associated with income and bias the measurement of inequality downward. Correcting for this bias with reweighting , the Gini coefficient for Europe is revised upwards by 3.7 percentage points. Similar results are reached with replacing of top incomes using values from the Pareto distribution when the cut point for the analysis is below the 95th percentile. For higher cut points, results with replacing are inconsistent suggesting that popular parametric distributions do not mimic real data well at the very top of the income distribution.

Keywords: top incomes; inequality measures; survey non-response; Pareto distribution; parametric estimation; EU SILC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B23 C C00 C01 C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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Working Paper: Top incomes and inequality measurement: A comparative analysis of correction methods using the EU-SILC data (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jecnmx:v:6:y:2018:i:2:p:30-:d:150429

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