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Is there any paper that looks at the distribution of wages? I'd like to see how many workers are in each percentile of labor income. I know that you could compute it using CPS or US tax data, but I suppose somebody must have done that before..

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1% of workers are in each percentile kinda by definition, no? :) – Jason Nichols Dec 4 '14 at 19:37
Well, I stated it completely (but consistently) the wrong way. I phrased the percentiles as labor income :/ – FooBar Dec 4 '14 at 19:43
Do you want to know total income earned (yearly) or do you want to know the distribution of earning power (like, distribution of hourly wages---or hours worked in combination with income)? Could you clarify? – jmbejara Dec 4 '14 at 19:45
The former is sufficient. However, I guess the latter is more informative, so more information always beats less information (also for future visitors of this question). – FooBar Dec 4 '14 at 19:58

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up vote 3 down vote accepted

Based on the 2010 US Census, Wikipedia has pretty much exactly what you seem to be looking for.

A sample graph:

enter image description here

though they of course also have tables and links to more data.

Or if you prefer raw data, the IRS SOI is available for 1996-2012.

And of course there's Piketty and Saez seminal paper on the subject (See Table 5 for their data analogous to the included Wikipedia picture)

And of course there's the BLS which publishes these things regularly by demographic, hourly only, or occupation/industry.

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It could be that the OP is looking for wages rather than income (like, hourly wages versus total yearly income earned). – jmbejara Dec 4 '14 at 19:40
could be, though would one not normally just divide by 2000 for US data? – Jason Nichols Dec 4 '14 at 19:41
No, because you don't know how many hours each individual worked (not average hours worked, I mean how many hours each individual worked). The question is important if you want to know something akin to the distribution of skill---or at least earning power---in the population. – jmbejara Dec 4 '14 at 19:43
that's problematic because high skill workers in the US are almost often (if not predominantly) salaried. Though you might be able to use the BLS data I just added for some of that. – Jason Nichols Dec 4 '14 at 19:45
Cool. Thanks. Yeah, problematic to find/estimate the figures, but still important to know. (I'm thinking about Mirrlees optimal taxation again.) – jmbejara Dec 4 '14 at 19:47

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