Top earners: cross-country facts

Author: Alejandro Badel, And Moira Daly, And Mark Huggett, And Martin Nybom, And

Published in: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, Third Quarter 2018, vol. 100, no. 3, pp. 237-257

Summary of Working paper 2017:9

We provide a common set of life-cycle earnings statistics using administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Sweden. Three qualitative patterns are common across countries: (1) the earnings distribution above the median fans out with age, (2) the extreme right tail of the earnings distribution becomes thicker with age, and (3) the growth rate of earnings over the working lifetime is larger for groups with higher lifetime earnings. Models of top earners should account for these qualitative patterns and, importantly, for how they quantitatively differ across countries.