Working Paper
Inequality in 3-D : Income, Consumption, and Wealth
Fisher, Jonathan D.; Thompson, Jeffrey P.; Johnson, David; Smeeding, Timothy (2018-01-02)
We do not need to and should not have to choose amongst income, consumption, or wealth as the superior measure of well-being. All three individually and jointly determine well-being. We are the first to study inequality in three conjoint dimensions for the same households, using income, consumption, and wealth from the 1989-2016 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCF). The paper focuses on two questions. What does inequality in two and three dimensions look like? Has inequality in multiple dimensions increased by less, by more, or by about the same as inequality in any one dimension? We find an ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2018-001

Working Paper
Estimating the marginal propensity to consume using the distributions of income, consumption and wealth
Fisher, Jonathan D.; Thompson, Jeffrey P.; Johnson, David; Smeeding, Timothy (2019-02-01)
Recent studies of economic inequality almost always separately examine income, consumption, and wealth inequality and, hence, miss the important synergy among the three measures explicit in the life-cycle budget constraint. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1999 through 2013, we examine whether these changes are more dramatic at higher or lower levels of wealth and find that the marginal propensity to consume is lower at higher wealth quintiles. This suggests that low-wealth households cannot smooth consumption as much as other households do, which further implies that increasing ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-4

Working Paper
Is the Consumer Expenditure Survey representative by income?
Swanson, David; Garner, Thesia; Sabelhaus, John Edward; Ash, Stephen; Greenlees, John S.; Henderson, Steven W.; Johnson, David (2012)
Aggregate under-reporting of household spending in the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) can result from two fundamental types of measurement errors: higher-income households (who presumably spend more than average) are under-represented in the CE estimation sample, or there is systematic under-reporting of spending by at least some CE survey respondents. Using a new data set linking CE units to zip-code level average Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), we show that the very highest-income households are less likely to respond to the survey when they are sampled, but unit non-response rates are not ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2012-36