Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/161196 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 10573
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the two data sources and develop an integrated approach for top-corrected Gini coefficients where we impute top incomes in survey data using information on top income distribution from tax data. We apply our approach to European EU-SILC survey data which in some countries include administrative data. We find higher inequality in those European countries that exclusively rely (Germany, UK) or have relied (Spain) on interviews for the provision of EU-SILC survey data as compared to countries that use administrative data.
Subjects: 
Gini coefficient
top income shares
survey data
tax record data
Pareto distribution
JEL: 
C46
C81
D31
H2
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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