Kevin Moore, Barry Johnson & Lisa Schreiber: "The Income-Wealth Paradox: Connections Between Realized Income and Wealth Among America's Aging Top Wealth-Holders"

This article, written by Kevin Moore, Barry Johnson, and Lisa Schreiber, is from the 2009 IRS Research Conference, "The Income-Wealth Paradox: Connections Between Realized Income and Wealth Among America's Aging Top Wealth-Holders." An excerpt from the introduction is below:

"This paper is intended to add to the understanding of the ways in which income from various sources changes with age for the very wealthy. It makes use of a special longitudinal panel of U.S. income tax data linked to wealth data reported on U.S. estate tax returns fi led for wealthy decedents. The relatively high estate tax fi ling threshold places these individuals at the top of the U.S. wealth distribution. Combined income and wealth data in the Statistics of Income Family Panel Decedent Dataset (FPDD) allow investigation of changes in the composition of realized income over time and also provide insights into asset management strategies employed by this elite group. In addition, this paper investigates the relationship between income and end-of-life wealth through the use of the portfolio data reported on the estate tax returns. Due to the limitations of the tax data, it incorporates data from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances to estimate these panel members' place in the overall U.S. distributions of income and wealth."

Posted by Patrick Siegfried, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.