Recent research on levels and trends in the United States in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. We show the sensitivity of alternative income measures in capturing income trends using a unified data set. Focusing solely on market income or including realized taxable...

Inconsistent censoring in the public-use March Current Population Survey (CPS) limits its usefulness in measuring labor earnings trends. Using Pareto estimation methods with less-censored internal CPS data, we create an enhanced cell-mean series to capture top earnings in the public-use CPS. We...

Most empirical studies of trends in labor earnings gaps by gender, race or education level are based on data from the public use March Current Population Survey (CPS). Using the internal March CPS, we show that inconsistent topcoding in the public use data will understate these gaps and...

To evaluate success in President Johnson's War on Poverty it is necessary to evaluate that success based on his scientifically arbitrary but policy relevant terms of engagement. No existing poverty measure is capable of measuring its success. We do so here by developing a Full-Income Poverty...

Researchers considering levels and trends in the resources available to the middle class traditionally measure the pre-tax cash income of either tax units or households. In this paper, we demonstrate that this choice carries significant implications for assessing income trends. Focusing on tax...

With data from the March CPS and using shift-share analysis, we analyze the factors that account for changes in post-tax post-transfer income during each of the past four recessions. What distinguishes the Great Recession is that drops in employment rather than wage earnings drove income...

Inconsistent censoring in the public-use March CPS limits its usefulness in measuring labor earnings trends, as previous approaches for imputing topcoded earnings systematically understate top earnings. Using Pareto estimation methods with less-censored internal data, we create an enhanced...