Top Income Shares and Budget Deficits

Minimum Distance Testing and Top Income Shares in Korea

We study Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness of fit tests for evaluating distributional hypotheses where unknown parameters need to be fitted. Following work of Pollard (1979), our approach uses a Cramérvon Mises minimum distance estimator for parameter estimation. The asymptotic null distribution of the resulting test statistic is represented by invariance principle arguments as a functional of a Brow...

Top income shares in Canada: recent trends and policy implications

According to Canadian taxfiler data, over the last thirty years there has been a surge in the income shares of the top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01% of income recipients, even with longitudinal smoothing by individual using three- or five-year moving averages. Top shares fell in 2008 and 2009, but only by a fraction of the overall surge. Alberta, British Columbia, and Ontario have much more pronou...

Volatile Top Income Shares in Switzerland? Reassessing the Evolution Between 1981 and 2010∗

We study the recent evolution of top incomes in Switzerland, analyzing both social security data on labor incomes and tax data on total income. The results show that in the last 20 years, the share of top incomes has risen, and the top 0.01% share even doubled, putting Switzerland similar to European countries for the top 1% group but closer to the U.S. for higher top incomes. However, top inco...

Optimal Budget Deficits

Do Budget Deficits Cause Inflation ?

In 2004, the federal budget deficit stood at $412 billion and reached 4.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Though not at a record level, the deficit as a fraction of GDP is now the largest since the early 1980s. Moreover, the recent swing from surplus to deficit is the largest since the end of World War II (Figure 1). The flip side of deficit spending is that the amount of government de...