Top Income : A Distribution Analysis for Liberal Professions, Entrepreneurs and Employees - A Microanalysis based on the German Income Tax Statistics

The distribution of societal resources is of high societal, economic and social policy importance. What is missing are reliable data above all about high income. This study will contribute to a well-founded analysis of high income for self employed – as (liberal) professions and entrepreneurs – and as employees, central groups of the labour market and the society at all. Before the background of requirements to a database and given official and non-official data sources we characterize our microdata base, the wage and income tax statistic 1995, a population statistic , which in particular is well-suited for the analysis ogf high income. We describe the used economic income concept and our 10% sample with about 3 Million anonymized tax records. For the first time we then present distributional and re-distributional results based on all income areas and for alternative high income thresholds – millionares and 200% of the mean – for professions, entrepreneurs and employees