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SEMINARIOS ACADEMICO CEA-MIPP: “Redistribution, Taxes, and Gender Gaps: Evidence from Top Income Adjustments in Chile”, Rafael Carranza (PUC)

Los invitamos al ciclo de  SEMINARIOS ACADEMICO CEA-MIPP:

Cuándo: Miércoles 11 de noviembre – 13:00 PM Santiago.

Dónde: Sala Consejo (401) – Beauchef 851, piso 4 | Departamento de Ingeniería Industrial.

Title: “Redistribution, Taxes, and Gender Gaps: Evidence from Top Income Adjustments in Chile”

Speaker: Rafael Carranza (PUC)

Abstract:

Access to tax data has transformed the study of inequality by enabling corrections to household surveys and improving the identification of top incomes. Despite this progress, relatively little attention has been paid to the broader consequences of survey adjustments beyond aggregate inequality measures. This study examines two adjustment methodologies, replacement and reweighting, applied to Chile’s CASEN household survey, and assesses their implications for income taxation and gender disparities. Using administrative records from the Chilean Internal Revenue Service, we show that while aggregate inequality measures differ only marginally across methods, gender-disaggregated adjustments reveal important nuances. Adjusting separately for men and women uncovers a small group of high-income women whose presence is obscured in aggregate corrections, raising female representation in the top decile from 36% to 39% and in the top 1% from 23% to 26-27%. Crucially, the choice of method reshapes the measured gender income gap: replacement, which overwrites incomes, restores the gap when applied by gender but mechanically compresses it when applied jointly, whereas reweighting, which cannot move incomes, leaves the within-top gap broadly unchanged. We make this explicit with an exact decomposition of women’s top 1% income share into a headcount channel and a relative-mean (gap) channel. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring survey adjustments to the research objective, particularly for subgroup and gender analyses.

*No olviden confirmar asistencia, para coordinar la solicitud de almuerzos con obarrera@dii.uchile.cl*