Consumption and Income Inequality in the United States since the 1960s

Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan

Journal of Political Economy, 2023, vol. 131, issue 2, 247 - 284

Abstract: Recent research concludes that the rise in consumption inequality mirrors, or even exceeds, the rise in income inequality. We revisit this finding, constructing improved measures of consumption, focusing on its well-measured components that are reported at a high and stable rate relative to national accounts. While overall income inequality rose over the past 5 decades, the rise in overall consumption inequality was small. The declining quality of income data likely contributes to these differences for the bottom of the distribution. Asset price changes likely account for some of the differences in recent years for the top of the distribution.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/721702 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/721702 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/721702

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().