This paper constructs high-frequency and timely income distributions for the United States. We develop a methodology to combine the information contained in high-frequency public data sources—including monthly household and employment surveys, quarterly censuses of employment and wages, and...

Tax relief for child care expenses, encompassing the Child Care Tax Credit and Dependent Care Assistance Plans, is the largest federal government program in the United States aimed at helping families with child care. We examine the distributional effects of these policies among families with...

Millions of federal, state and local government employees have lifetime earnings that are divided between employment that is covered by the Social Security system and employment that is not covered. Because Social Security benefits are a non-linear function of covered lifetime earnings, the...

We study the distributional consequences of student debt forgiveness in present value terms, accounting for differences in repayment behavior across the earnings distribution. Full or partial forgiveness is regressive because high earners took larger loans, but also because, for low earners,...

In the first part of the paper we report estimated transfers in the Social Security system for the Retirement History Survey sample.We define transfers to be the difference between the expected presentvalue of benefits less the present value of taxes paid in, where the latter is adjusted for the...

In this paper we assess the degree to which the current social security system redistributes income from rich to poor. We then estimate the impact of various proposed changes to social security on the overall redistributive effect of the system. Our analysis takes a steady state approach in...

This paper describes a new household-level data file based on merged information from the IRS Individual Tax File, the Current Population Survey, the National Medical Expenditure Survey, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new file includes descriptive data on household income as well as...

This paper compares Social Security means tests that would reduce benefits for recipients who fall in the top quarter of the income distribution with means tests aimed at those in the top quarter of the wealth distribution. Both means tests would reduce the average benefits for the affected...

We discuss recent empirical research on how globalization has affected income inequality in developing countries. We begin with a discussion of conceptual issues regarding the measurement of globalization and inequality. Next, we present empirical evidence on the evolution of globalization and...