Levels and long-term trends in earnings inequality: Overcoming current population survey censoring problems using the GB2 distribution

Shuaizhang Feng; Richard V. Burkhauser; J. S. Butler

doi:10.1198/073500105000000144

Levels and long-term trends in earnings inequality: Overcoming current population survey censoring problems using the GB2 distribution

Shuaizhang Feng
, Richard V. Burkhauser
, J. S. Butler

Producción científica: Review article › revisión exhaustiva

35 Citas (Scopus)

Resumen

Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earnings of full-time, full-year workers using the generalized beta distribution of the second kind, calculating Gini coefficients from the estimated parameters, and comparing them with past findings.

Idioma original	English
Páginas (desde-hasta)	57-62
Número de páginas	6
Publicación	Journal of Business and Economic Statistics
Volumen	24
N.º	1
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1198/073500105000000144
Estado	Published - ene 2006

Nota bibliográfica

Funding Information:
Partial funding for the work reported in this article came from the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, cooperative agreement 1331390038. This work does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The authors thank Kenneth A. Couch, Andrew J. Houtenville, Yingyao Hu, Dean R. Lillard, and Francesca Molinari for comments on earlier versions. They also gratefully acknowledge comments from an anonymous referee, which led to considerable improvements of this article.

Financiación

Partial funding for the work reported in this article came from the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, cooperative agreement 1331390038. This work does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The authors thank Kenneth A. Couch, Andrew J. Houtenville, Yingyao Hu, Dean R. Lillard, and Francesca Molinari for comments on earlier versions. They also gratefully acknowledge comments from an anonymous referee, which led to considerable improvements of this article.

Financiadores	Número del financiador
U.S. Department of Education, OSERS
National Institute of Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR)	1331390038

ODS de las Naciones Unidas

Este resultado contribuye a los siguientes Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible

Reduced inequalities

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Statistics and Probability
Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
Economics and Econometrics
Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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title = "Levels and long-term trends in earnings inequality: Overcoming current population survey censoring problems using the GB2 distribution",

abstract = "Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earnings of full-time, full-year workers using the generalized beta distribution of the second kind, calculating Gini coefficients from the estimated parameters, and comparing them with past findings.",

keywords = "Current Population Survey, Gini values, Inequality measurement, Time consistency",

author = "Shuaizhang Feng and Burkhauser, \{Richard V.\} and Butler, \{J. S.\}",

note = "Funding Information: Partial funding for the work reported in this article came from the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, cooperative agreement 1331390038. This work does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The authors thank Kenneth A. Couch, Andrew J. Houtenville, Yingyao Hu, Dean R. Lillard, and Francesca Molinari for comments on earlier versions. They also gratefully acknowledge comments from an anonymous referee, which led to considerable improvements of this article.",

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AU - Feng, Shuaizhang

AU - Burkhauser, Richard V.

AU - Butler, J. S.

N1 - Funding Information: Partial funding for the work reported in this article came from the U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, cooperative agreement 1331390038. This work does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The authors thank Kenneth A. Couch, Andrew J. Houtenville, Yingyao Hu, Dean R. Lillard, and Francesca Molinari for comments on earlier versions. They also gratefully acknowledge comments from an anonymous referee, which led to considerable improvements of this article.

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N2 - Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earnings of full-time, full-year workers using the generalized beta distribution of the second kind, calculating Gini coefficients from the estimated parameters, and comparing them with past findings.

AB - Over its history, the March Current Population Survey (CPS) has increasingly captured the upper tail of the distribution of all sources of income. This, together with time-consistency problems in top coding, means that users of both the public-use and restricted-access CPS will understate the level of wage earnings and income inequality in earlier years and overstate their growth over time. We address this problem by modeling the personal earnings of full-time, full-year workers using the generalized beta distribution of the second kind, calculating Gini coefficients from the estimated parameters, and comparing them with past findings.

KW - Current Population Survey

KW - Gini values

KW - Inequality measurement

KW - Time consistency

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Levels and long-term trends in earnings inequality: Overcoming current population survey censoring problems using the GB2 distribution

Resumen

Nota bibliográfica

Financiación

ODS de las Naciones Unidas

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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