Creating a 100-Year Time Series of Tax Data with Consistent Income Ranges from Existing Historical Tabulations and Current Microdata - Part 1: Why and How

• Activity Number: 568
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 4, 2010 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): Victoria Bryant*+ and Yan K. Liu and Fritz Scheuren and Katie Thamert
• Companies: IRS and IRS and NORC and IRS
• Keywords: Time-Series ; Income Distribution ; Historical Data ; Data Manipulation ; Weight Calibration ; Statistics of Income

Abstract

Statistics of Income has published annual income statistics since 1913. While these publications continually prove to be invaluable to users, older publications use a different income definition, for sampling purposes, and groups. In order to compare the income statistics across years, one would have to reconstruct these tables to eliminate these differences. Because SOI only has the cross-sectional individual return sampled micro data for years since 1960, attempts at updating prior year tables becomes difficult at best. This paper will discuss the need and feasibly of reproducing tables using new income groups by way of models and income distributions built from current micro data. More specifically, this paper will look at the possiblity of using 2007 microdata to reproduce both 1997 and 1987 published tables.