What really happened to consumption inequality in the US?

By Erich Battistin, Hidehiko Ichimura. 2004

145 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States. The Interview sample follows survey households over four calendar quarters and consists of retrospectively collected information about monthly expenditures on durable and non-durable goods. The Diary sample interviews household for two consecutive weeks and includes detailed information about frequently purchased items (food, personal cares and household supplies). Most reliable information from each sample is exploited to derive a correction for the measurement error affecting observed measures of consumption inequality in the two surveys. We find that consumption inequality, as measured by the standard deviation of log non-durable consumption, has increased by roughly 5% points during the 1990s.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d70ad9b16f01b8ade7863e642895fbf4a884d226

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Citations in the corpus

Consumption and labor supply with partial insurance: An analytical framework (2014, unknown): “(5) and ( 6 ), it is immediate that consumption is increasing in the”
Measuring trends in leisure (2007, unknown): “The timing of the changing inequality in leisure across education groups mirrors the well documented timing of the changing inequality in wages and consumption (see Katz and Autor (1999) and Attanasio et al. (2004) for wages and consumption, respectively).”
Statistical Inference with Generalized Gini Indices of Inequality, Poverty, and Welfare (2009, background): “These parameter values correspond to the middle of the range of values reported by Attanasio, Battistin, and Ichimura (2004) for the distribution of per-capita nondurable expenditure based on the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey over the period 1984–1998.”
Measuring living standards with income and consumption: evidence from the UK (2012, background): “6 On the other hand, various authors have argued that expenditure data in the US is also measured with error, and have proposed various ways to correct for this: see, for example, Attanasio et al. (2005), Parker et al. (2009) and Aguiar and Bils (2011).”
Earnings Inequality and Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Social Security Data Since 1937 (2010, background): “, Cutler and Katz (1991), Krueger and Perri (2006), Slesnick (2001), Attanasio et al. (2007). Previous work using SSA data before the 1980s has almost always used data capped at the Social Security annual maximum (which was around the median in the 1960s) making it impossible to study the top half o”
The Effects of Technical Change on Labor Market Inequalities (2004, unknown): “From equation (20) of Section 5, note that as hs rises (skill-biased technical change), the pooling, or mismatch, equilibrium is less likely to survive, so within-group inequality falls.”
Insurance and Opportunities: A Welfare Analysis of Labor Market Risk (2008, background): “Using the definition for the cost of volatility in equation ( 7 ) gives”
Calculating Comparable Statistics From Incomparable Surveys, With an Application to Poverty in India (2004, methodology): “However, close examination of the figures in row (3) shows that in the rural sector mean pce in miscellaneous items is systematically higher when computed using the standard questionnaire, even if the differences are always small.”
Two Views of Inequality Over the Life Cycle (2005, unknown): “– Measurement Error in the CEX: While KP and Slesnick and Ulker (2004) focus exclusively on the survey datasets in the CEX, Attanasio et al. (2004) find that CEX diary data suggest a somewhat larger increase in consumption inequality over time.”