Top earners: cross-country facts

Alejandro Badel (), Moira Daly, Mark Huggett and Martin Nybom
Additional contact information
Alejandro Badel: Georgetown University and Bureau of Labor Statistics, Postal: USA

No 2017:9, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: We provide a common set of life-cycle earnings statistics using administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Sweden. Three qualitative patterns are common across countries: (1) the earnings distribution above the median fans out with age, (2) the extreme right tail of the earnings distribution becomes thicker with age, and (3) the growth rate of earnings over the working lifetime is larger for groups with higher lifetime earnings. Models of top earners should account for these qualitative patterns and, importantly, for how they quantitatively differ across countries.

Keywords: earnings; inequality; top earners; top incomes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 D91 H21 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2017-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ifau.se/globalassets/pdf/se/2017/wp2017 ... ss-country-facts.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts (2018)
Working Paper: Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts (2017)
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:hhs:ifauwp:2017_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy IFAU, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ali Ghooloo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).