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Research report

Simulating Income Tax Liabilities in the Survey of Consumer Finances

William G. Gale, Swati Joshi, Christopher Pulliam, John Sabelhaus
February 8, 2022
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Abstract

The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is a triennial household survey with extensive demographic, income, and balance sheet information. The SCF is unique among public-use household surveys because it oversamples wealthy households and is thus suitable for studying wealth and income inequality across the entire population, but the survey does not collect detailed information about tax filing or tax liabilities. We develop a method for separating SCF households into tax units and creating the necessary inputs for estimating taxes using the NBER TAXSIM model. We validate our methods by benchmarking against published tax filings. Our methodology provides measures of after-tax incomes and effective tax rates for SCF households under current law and allows analysis of tax changes in ways that are not possible using administrative tax data alone.

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Meet the Experts

  • William G. Gale
    Codirector
  • Swati Joshi
    Senior Research Assistant, Brookings Institution
  • Christopher Pulliam
    Research Analyst, Brookings Institution
  • John Sabelhaus
    Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Research report

New Evidence on The Effect of The TCJA On the Housing Market

Robert McClelland, Livia Mucciolo, Safia Sayed
March 30, 2022
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