TY  - JOUR
AU  - Feenberg,Daniel R.
AU  - Poterba,James M
TI  - The Income and Tax Share of Very High Income Households, 1960-1995
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7525
PY  - 2000
Y2  - February 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7525
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7525.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Daniel R. Feenberg
National Bureau of Economic Research
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/588-0343
Fax: 617/868-2742
E-Mail: feenberg@nber.org

James M. Poterba
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-350
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-6673
Fax: 617/258-7804
E-Mail: poterba@nber.org
AB  - This paper presents new information on the fraction of adjusted gross income, and of wages and salaries, that is reported by taxpayers in the top one half of one percent of the income distribution.  This corresponds to roughly five hundred thousand households in the late 1990s.  This paper relies on data from the Treasury's Individual Income Tax Model for the period 1960-1995. The definition of adjusted gross income is standardized, so that changes in the tax law do not affect the measured concentration of AGI.  The results suggest that the share of AGI reported by the highest income households increased significantly between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s, with most of the increase taking place in the years immediately following the Tax Reform Act of 1986.  While we find some evidence of transitory changes in the concentration of income around major tax changes, which may be the result of income retiming by high income taxpayers, re-timing does not seem to explain most of the changes since 1986.
ER  -