is to produce first-class research and forge a strong link between the academic community and decision-makers in the public and private sectors around an issue of critical importance to the nation's future. To achieve this mission, the Center sponsors a wide variety of research projects, transmits new findings to a broad audience, trains new scholars, and broadens access to valuable data sources.

Rapid growth in the earnings of the highest earners over the past two and a half decades has contributed to strains on Social Security's finances and made projecting lifetime earnings on a year-by-year basis -already a complicated technical problem -even more challenging. This project uses various descriptive techniques and high-quality administrative earnings data matched to household surveys to explore related questions about the changing wage distribution.We first describe the characteristics of high earners, both at a point in time and over longer periods (from 1983 through 2010). We then evaluate how well SSA's MINT7 dynamic microsimulation model projects inequality in the earnings distribution and the long-term characteristics of earnings paths.

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is to produce first-class research and forge a strong link between the academic community and decision-makers in the public and private sectors around an issue of critical importance to the nation's future. To achieve this mission, the Center sponsors a wide variety of research projects, transmits new findings to a broad audience, trains new scholars, and broadens access to valuable data sources.