IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/joecin/v21y2023i3d10.1007_s10888-023-09566-w.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Beyond tax-survey combination: inequality and the blurry household-firm border

Author

Listed:
  • Mauricio De Rosa

    (Universidad de la República
    Paris School of Economics)

  • Joan Vilá

    (Universidad de la República)

Abstract

Inequality evidence based on surveys, tax records, or their combination often result in divergent trends, fueling the distributional debate in Latin America. Beyond the strengths and weaknesses of these sources and their combination, tax-survey data face two shortcomings: they are unable to account for aggregate household or national income, and they are affected by firm owners’ decisions about the distribution of profits, changing which incomes researchers can actually observe. We combine social security data, household surveys and matched personal and firm tax records, which allows us to accurately account for all income sources, particularly capital incomes at the firm and individual level. Based on these unique data, we assess inequality trends in Uruguay, showing that increasing profit-distribution by firms pushes tax-survey top shares upwards, but that this trend is offset when undistributed profits are accounted for. These results call for caution when using tax-survey data without considering changes in profit-distribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Mauricio De Rosa & Joan Vilá, 2023. "Beyond tax-survey combination: inequality and the blurry household-firm border," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 21(3), pages 537-572, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:joecin:v:21:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s10888-023-09566-w
    DOI: 10.1007/s10888-023-09566-w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10888-023-09566-w
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10888-023-09566-w?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Firms; Income inequality; National accounts; Latin America; Tax records;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D33 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Factor Income Distribution
    • E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:joecin:v:21:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s10888-023-09566-w. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.