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

Author

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  • Mauricio De Rosa

    (Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía)

  • Joan Vilá

    (Universidad de la República (Uruguay). Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y de Administración. Instituto de Economía)

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 relative strengths and weaknesses of these sources, tax-survey data still face two important shortcomings: they are unable to account for the entirety of household or national income, and they are affected by firm owners' decisions about the distribution of profits, changing which incomes researchers can actually observe. Based on unique data which matches social security data, household surveys, personal income tax records, and firm tax records, we assess inequality trends in Uruguay in light of these issues. We show that increasing profit-distribution behavior by firms pushes tax-survey top shares upwards, but that this trend is offset when undistributed profits are accounted for. Although top income groups benefited to a greater extent from recent economic growth, overall inequality decreased in tax-survey, household income, and national income series

Suggested Citation

  • Mauricio De Rosa & Joan Vilá, 2022. "Beyond tax-survey combination: inequality and the blurry household-firm border," Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) 22-10, Instituto de Economía - IECON.
    • Handle: RePEc:ulr:wpaper:dt-10-22
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    File URL: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/34823
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. De Rosa, Mauricio & Flores, Ignacio & Morgan, Marc, 2022. "More Unequal or Not as Rich? Revisiting the Latin American Exception," SocArXiv akq89, Center for Open Science.

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    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

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