U.S. Earnings, Income, and Wealth Distribution

This page provides results from "2013 Update on the U.S. Earnings, Income, and Wealth Distributional Facts: A View from Macroeconomic Modelers" joint with José-Víctor Ríos-Rull.

Important: We updated all our results from the paper to the 2019 SCF data. The paper shows 2013 SCF data. We thank Sofia Pessoa for outstanding research assistance and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2126/1– 390838866 for financial support. This pdf document contains figures and tables in correspondence to the original paper using the latest 2019 SCF data. This pdf document contains earlier figures and tables using the 2016 SCF data.

The Excel files contain results for each of the Survey of Consumer Finances from 1989 to 2019. Dollar values are in 2019 Dollars.

Please send comments and questions regading this data by email to mokuhn@uni-bonn.de

For more information on the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data please visit https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

The distributions of Earnings, Income and Wealth

Joint distributions of earnings, income, and wealth

Joint distributions of earnings and wealth. Each Excel file contains two sheets. The sheet "Probabilities" contains the distribution across cells. The sheet "Means" contains the conditional means for earnings (E), income (I), and wealth (W) for each of the cells. Earnings cells are in rows, wealth cells are in columns.

1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 2019

Other Dimensions of Inequality

The Richest

All numbers in these two files are in percentage points.

Decomposition of wealth inequality