Tax Data for Wealth Concentration Analysis: An Application to Spanish Wealth Tax

Abstract

As recent studies in different countries show, tax data offer the opportunity to estimate income or wealth shares for the upper income groups. However, several critical points must be considered in order to avoid misleading conclusions: the interpolation technique used, legal amendments, and tax fraud. In this note we take Spanish wealth tax as a case study to assess the importance of these factors, and compare our results with those obtained by Alvaredo and Saez (2009 ). Although the results of the two analyses are very similar, our approach complements theirs by offering a more precise treatment of the correction of fiscal underassessment and tax fraud in real estate, which is the main asset in Spaniards' portfolios. Copyright 2010 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth 2010 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

Correcting for the Missing Rich: An Application to Wealth Survey Data

“…The assumption of a Pareto distribution is widely used in studying the distribution of income (see, e.g., Feenberg and Poterba, ; Piketty, ; Piketty and Saez, ) and wealth (e.g., Kopczuk and Saez, ; Alvaredo and Saez, ; Bach et al ., , ; Durán‐Cabré and Esteller‐Moré, ; Bach and Beznoska, ; Eckerstorfer et al ., ; Vermeulen, ).…”