This study combines the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances data and the Fiscal Analyzer, a highly detailed life-cycle consumption-smoothing program, to a) measure ultimate economic inequality - inequality in lifetime spending power - within cohorts, b) assess fiscal progressivity...

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...

Older Americans have experienced dramatic gains in life expectancy in recent decades, but an emerging literature reveals that these gains are accumulating mostly to those at the top of the income distribution. We explore how growing inequality in life expectancy affects lifetime benefits from...

This paper presents new information on the fraction of adjusted gross income, and of wages and salaries, that is reported by taxpayers in the top one half of one percent of the income distribution. This corresponds to roughly five hundred thousand households in the late 1990s. This paper relies...

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 examines changes over time in the degree to which the resources (human plus nonhuman wealth) of the elderly have been annuitized. Using data from the 1962 and 1983 Federal Reserve Surveys of Consumer Finances we find evidence of an increase in annuitization which is particularly...

This implies that low-income households in one year have some chance of being higher-income households in other years, and significantly affects the estimated distributional burden of excise taxes. This paper shows that household expenditures on gasoline, alcohol, and tobacco as a share of total...

We evaluate the effects of inequality, fiscal policy, and COVID19 restrictions in a model of economic slack with potentially rigid capital operating costs. Inequality has large negative effects on output, while also diminishing the effects of demand-side fiscal stimulus. COVID restrictions can...

This paper explores the relationship between household marginal income tax rates, the set of assets that households own, and the portfolio shares accounted for by each of these assets. It analyzes data from the 1983, 1989, 1992, and 1995 Surveys of Consumer Finances and develops a new algorithm...