Must-Read: Marshall Steinbaum: Sampling Bias in “Firming Up Inequality”

Must-Read: Marshall Steinbaum: Sampling Bias in “Firming Up Inequality”: “Firming Up Inequality [Song, Price, Guvenen, and Bloom (2015)]…

…estimates the extent to which increasing inequality in the distribution of earnings from labor is caused by rising within- vs. between- inequality. But its statistical sampling from the Social Security Master Earnings File (MEF) is biased in a way that reduces inequality in the sample relative to the population, arti