This README is for programs related to "Measuring Income and Wealth at the Top..." (Bricker, Henriques, Krimmel, and Sabelhaus) for the Spring 2016 BPEA.

The main data used in this paper are from the internal version of the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF). A public version of the SCF is available for download by any interested researcher (please see http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/scfindex.htm). As described in Fries (2001), these public data are required to meet disclosure avoidance standards similar to the public version of individual tax return data files published by the Statistics of Income at the Internal Revenue Service. Please contact Kevin Moore, the project director of the SCF, at the Federal Reserve Board at kevin.b.moore@frb.gov for more information. 

The attached do files, though, are set up to run on the public SCF data. The numbers from the public data are comparable to those from the internal data, though the top shares are slightly lower due to public disclosure edits to the data. 

We cannot release the data used to generate figures 3-6 in this paper, though, as they use non-public SOI income data. We are attaching do files that we used to generate the figures, though, and a public use file of the SOI data are available from NBER (http://users.nber.org/~taxsim/gdb/).  

References 
Fries, Gerhard. 2001 "Disclosure Review and the 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances" (http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/files/asa2003f6.pdf).

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The create.bpea program is used to generate SCF-based data in figures 1,2,7,8,10,11, and 12. Note: links to the SCF public data are included in this program. The SCF "bulletin" data, though, are included here (in the zip file).

The bpea.soi program creates figures 3-6 for the BPEA paper. Note, this program uses proprietary data which cannot be publicly released. The initial data file used in this program is the "control" file of the SCF, which describes final outcomes of respondents and non-respondents to the SCF. These data include confidential respondent information and cannot be released. The second data file is the "allindex" file, which is a version of the 2011 INSOLE file from the Statistics of Income (SOI) division of IRS. These data, again, are not public. The allindex file also contains sampling data for the SCF (bpwicm are sampling strata and windexes are wealth indices described in appendix).

The joint.returns.char.foundations.do program uses 2010 SCF data to support some assertions made in the paper that are not in figures or tables (footnote 10 and second paragraph of section I.C). 

The Excel file contains the raw data to plot each figure.
