Measuring and Comparing Consumption Inequality between France and the United States

Aliocha Accardo, Sylvérie Herbert, Cristina Jude and Adrian Penalver

Working papers from Banque de France

Abstract: This paper constructs an annual dataset of consumption by income quintiles for France since 1989 in order to make a granular comparison of consumption inequality with the United States. First, we match consumption data from a survey run every five years with the national accounts, and then use a Kalman filter to interpolate missing observations, leveraging the yearly national accounts data to improve the performance of the Kalman filter. We validate this technique by applying it to a US dataset with pseudo-missing data comparable wiThéour French data. Second, we construct a US consumption dataset compatible with the French classification of consumption items and compare consumption inequality trends between the US and France. We find consumption inequality to be overall lower than income inequality, and not to follow the dynamics of income inequality. Consumption inequality is also higher in the US than in France. Finally, based on the weights of the different consumption items, we construct annual consumption deflators by quintiles. We find that dispersion in price pressures across income groups is less marked in France than in the United States, and overall quite small in both countries.

Keywords: Inequality; Consumption; Income; Inflation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E21 E31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.banque-france.fr/sites/defaul ... ocuments/wp904_0.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfr:banfra:904

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working papers from Banque de France Banque de France 31 Rue Croix des Petits Champs LABOLOG - 49-1404 75049 PARIS. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael brassart ().