Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes

Abstract

The Gini coefficient has been calculated using incomes that have been equivalised, are net of all direct taxes and have been measured before housing costs have been deducted.

Who are the top 1% earners in Europe?

“…They can therefore be used for external benchmarking. Estimates in these studies are similar to the ones in this paper, for instance for France (Amar, 2010) and the United Kingdom (Brewer et al, 2007). This indicates that the SES sample is broadly representative of the characteristics of the employees with the 1% highest labour incomes.…”

“…With respect to age, according to Brewer et al (2007) in 2005 about 65% of the top 1% in the United Kingdom were between 35 and 54 years old, the same number the analysis in this paper yields for 30-49-year-olds. For France, Amar (2010) estimates that in 2007 72% among the 1% highest earners were in the 40s and 50s, which is nearly identical to the 71% in this paper.…”

“…For the United States, different authors have analysed the composition of top-income households by their age (Auten et al, 2013), gender (Guvenen et al, 2014), industry (Kaplan and Rauh, 2010) and occupation (Bakija et al, 2012). Brewer et al (2007) provide a comprehensive account of the characteristics of high earners in the United Kingdom. Several papers have conducted similar investigations for other countries; among them are Fortin et al (2012) andStatistics Canada (2013) for Canada, Amar (2010) and Godechot (2012) for France, and Budría and Díaz-Giménez (2007) for Spain.…”

“…The most important caveat is the absence of selfemployed persons from the sample. For example, Brewer et al (2007) find that the top 1% in the United Kingdom receive more of their income, about 22%, from self-employment than the average taxpayer. A final consideration is the frequently used practice of "top-coding", which censors data by reporting a smaller value for incomes above a threshold to ensure anonymity.…”

“…Atkinson et al (2015) find that the proportion of women among the top 1% is about 9% in Norway, 23% in Spain and 17% in the United Kingdom, compared with 11% for Norway, 24% for Spain and 13% for the United Kingdom in this paper. Similarly, Brewer et al (2007) estimate that in 2005 approximately 15% of the top 1% in the United Kingdom were women. According to Amar (2010), in 2007 13% among the top 1% earners in France's private sector were women, only a tad less than the 14% this paper finds.…”