This paper examines the entry-level labor market for academic economists and investigates the determinants of market salaries. The focus is on the effects of tenure and nontenure track jobs and departmental ranking that are based upon faculty research productivity. The results reveal that the...

This paper shows that using a one-parameter functional form for the Lorenz curve is equivalent to ranking income distributions based on their Gini indices. Irrespective of the underlying data, the fitted Lorenz curves can never intersect. Circu mstances in which one-parameter Lorenz curves can...

Some participants in income and labor market surveys fail to report their earnings. We use data on imputed and reported wages for the same workers, taken from the 1988 change in the CPS processing system to compare actual earnings to both hot-deck and earnings-equations imputations. Our results...

This paper develops distribution-free statistical inference procedures to test for changes in tax progressivity. Tests for both the Reynolds-Smolensky index of residual progression and the Kakwani index of liability progression are provided. Changes in tax progressivity in three Western...

Typically, the study of post-war convergence has primarily focused on convergence in per capita incomes. By investigating convergence at population class means we can characterize convergence as either "equal" or "unequal" depending upon whether the (inverse) income distribution functions are...

The reductions in the top marginal rates during the 1980's have renewed interest in the relationship between the underreporting of income and the marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, theory provides no clear answer to question of whether lower marginal tax rates reduce or increase the size of the...