Studying consumption patterns using registry data: lessons from Swedish administrative data

Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais and Johannes Spinnewijn

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper measures consumption expenditures using registry data on income and asset holdings in Sweden and illustrates how a registry-based measure can alleviate some critical limitations of traditional survey measures in capturing changes in consumption inequality and consumption responses to shocks. In the construction of our measure, we build on previous work exploiting the identity coming from the household budget constraint between consumption expenditures and income net of savings. We try to improve this measure using more registry information to account for the contribution of both financial and real assets to consumption flows. We demonstrate the power of the registry-based measure to study the relationship between income and consumption inequality, especially at the top of the income distribution. We also exploit the longitudinal dimension to study consumption responses to important life-time events and the different means used to smooth consumption.

Keywords: consumption measurement; registry data; inequality and smoothing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2017-10-29
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87777/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Studying Consumption Patterns using Registry Data: Lessons From Swedish Administrative Data (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:87777

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