期刊名称：DIW Diskussionspapiere / Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
出版年度：2007
卷号：2007
出版社：Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
摘要：The March Current Population Survey (CPS) is the primary data source for
estimation of levels and trends in labor earnings and income inequality in the
USA. Time-inconsistency problems related to top coding in theses data have led
many researchers to use the ratio of the 90th and 10th percentiles of these
distributions (P90/P10) rather than a more traditional summary measure of
inequality. With access to public use and restricted-access internal CPS data,
and bounding methods, we show that using P90/P10 does not completely obviate
timeinconsistency problems, especially for household income inequality trends.
Using internal data, we create consistent cell mean values for all top-coded
public use values that, when used with public use data, closely track inequality
trends in labor earnings and household income using internal data. But estimates
of longer-term inequality trends with these corrected data based on P90/P10
differ from those based on the Gini coefficient. The choice of inequality
measure matters.
关键词：Inequality, income, earnings, Current Population Survey, decile ratio, Gini
coefficient
