Capital Gains and Inequality of Personal Income: Some Results from Survey Data
Abstract This paper deals with income distribution of capital gains and their effect on measures of income inequality for 1962. Aggregate accrued gains are allocated to various income classes by using microdata from the Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers. The results show that accrued gains are distributed more unevenly than money income. The Gini coefficient drops from 0.41 to 0.35 when accrued losses for 1962 are subtracted from income, but it increases to 0.43 when average gains for 1960–64 are added to income. Variance of natural logarithms, the other measure of inequality used, also shows a similar pattern.