Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts

22 Pages Posted: 20 Jul 2018 Last revised: 19 Mar 2020

See all articles by Alejandro Badel

Alejandro Badel

Federal Reserve Banks - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Moira Daly

Copenhagen Business School

Mark Huggett

Georgetown University - Department of Economics

Martin Nybom

Stockholm University - Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI)

Date Written: 2018

Abstract

We provide a common set of life cycle earnings statistics based on administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and Sweden. We find three qualitative patterns, which are common across countries. First, top-earnings inequality increases over the working lifetime. Second, the extreme right tail of the earnings distribution becomes thicker with age over the working lifetime. Third, top lifetime earners exhibit dramatic earnings growth over their working lifetime. Models of top earners should account for these three patterns and, importantly, for how they quantitatively differ across countries.

JEL Classification: D31, D91, H21, J31

Suggested Citation

Badel, Alejandro and Daly, Moira and Huggett, Mark and Nybom, Martin, Top Earners: Cross-Country Facts (2018). Review, Vol. 100, Issue 3, pp. 237-57, 2018, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3217033 or http://dx.doi.org/10.20955/r.100.237-57

Alejandro Badel

Federal Reserve Banks - Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ( email )

411 Locust St
Saint Louis, MO 63011
United States

Moira Daly

Copenhagen Business School

Mark Huggett

Georgetown University - Department of Economics ( email )

Washington, DC 20057
United States
202-687-6683 (Phone)

Martin Nybom (Contact Author)

Stockholm University - Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) ( email )

Kyrkgatan 43B
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden

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