Distributing Personal Income: Trends Over Time / Dennis Fixler, Marina Gindelsky, David Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fixler, Dennis.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Gindelsky, Marina.

Johnson, David.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26996.

NBER working paper series no. w26996

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

This paper constructs a distribution of Personal Income for the United States (2007-2016) to investigate the relationship between inequality and macroeconomic growth. We extend a perspective first presented in Fixler and Johnson (2014) and further developed in Fixler et al. (2017) and Fixler, Gindelsky, and Johnson (2018, 2019) to develop a national account-based measure using a decade of publicly available survey, tax, and administrative data. By using (equivalized) households as the base unit of analysis and focusing on a more inclusive definition of income than most inequality studies (i.e., including health, transfers, and financial assets), we improve on existing economic measures of inequality in a meaningful way and bridge the gap between micro data and macro statistics. We produce a wide set of inequality results over the period, drawing a comparison with other studies (including Auten and Splinter (2019) and Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018)).

Notes:

Print version record

April 2020.