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Distributing Personal Income: Trends over Time

Dennis Fixler, Marina Gindelsky, David Johnson


This chapter is a preliminary draft unless otherwise noted. It may not have been subjected to the formal review process of the NBER. This page will be updated as the chapter is revised.

Chapter in forthcoming NBER book Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth, Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Janet C. Gornick, Barry Johnson, and Arthur Kennickell, editors
Conference held March 5-6, 2020
Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press
in NBER Book Series Studies in Income and Wealth

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)).

This paper is available as PDF (2115 K) or via email

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

This chapter first appeared as NBER working paper w26996, Distributing Personal Income: Trends Over Time, Dennis Fixler, Marina Gindelsky, David Johnson
 
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