IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwppe/0309004.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Household Wealth, Public Consumption, and Economic Well-Being in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Edward N. Wolff

    (The Levy Economics Institute & New York University)

  • Ajit Zacharias

    (The Levy Economics Institute)

  • Asena Caner

    (The Levy Economics Institute)

Abstract

Standard official measures of economic well-being are based on money income. The general consensus is that such measures are seriously flawed because they ignore several crucial determinants of well-being. We examine two such determinants-household wealth and public consumption-in the context of the United States. Our findings suggest that the level and distribution of economic well-being is substantially altered when money income is adjusted for wealth or public consumption.

Suggested Citation

  • Edward N. Wolff & Ajit Zacharias & Asena Caner, 2003. "Household Wealth, Public Consumption, and Economic Well-Being in the United States," Public Economics 0309004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwppe:0309004
    Note: Type of Document - word; prepared on PC; to print on HP/PostScript; pages: 33; figures: included
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0309/0309004.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0309/0309004.ps.gz
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0309/0309004.doc.gz
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy M. Smeeding & Daniel H. Weinberg, 2001. "Toward a Uniform Definition of Household Income," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 47(1), pages 1-24, March.
    2. Patricia Ruggles & Michael O'Higgins, 1981. "The Distribution Of Public Expenditure Among Households In The United States," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 27(2), pages 137-164, June.
    3. Donald L. Lerman & James J. Mikesell, 1988. "Impacts of Adding Net Worth to the Poverty Definition," Eastern Economic Journal, Eastern Economic Association, vol. 14(4), pages 357-370, Oct-Dec.
    4. Asena Caner & Ed Wolff, 2002. "Asset Poverty in the United States, 1984-1999: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics," Microeconomics 0209002, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Ruggles, Patricia & O'Higgins, Michael, 1981. "The Distribution of Public Expenditure among Households in the United States," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 27(2), pages 137-164, June.
    6. Edward N. Wolff & Ajit Zacharias, 2003. "The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_372, Levy Economics Institute.
    7. Asena Caner & Edward Wolff, 2004. "Asset Poverty in the United States, 1984-1999," Challenge, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 47(1), pages 5-52.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Constantin Anghelache & Madalina Gabriela Anghel & Marius Popovici, 2015. "Multiple Regressions Used in Analysis of Private Consumption and Public Final Consumption Evolution," International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, Human Resource Management Academic Research Society, International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences, vol. 5(4), pages 69-73, October.
    2. Francisco Azpitarte, 2010. "The household wealth distribution in Spain: The role of housing and financial wealth," Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics, IEF, vol. 194(3), pages 65-90, October.
    3. Francisco Azpitarte, 2008. "The Household Wealth Distribution in Spain: The Role of Housing and Financial Wealth," Working Papers 83, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    4. Teixidó, Jordi J. & Verde, Stefano F., 2017. "Is the Gasoline Tax Regressive in the Twenty-First Century? Taking Wealth into Account," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 109-125.
    5. Antonio Jurado & Jesus Perez-Mayo, 2012. "Construction and Evolution of a Multidimensional Well-Being Index for the Spanish Regions," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 107(2), pages 259-279, June.
    6. Deborah Cobb-Clark, 2007. "Pushing the boundaries of immigration research: What can we learn from New Zealand?," New Zealand Economic Papers, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(2), pages 123-130.
    7. Fabio Boncinelli & Leonardo Casini, 2014. "A Comparison of the Well-Being of Agricultural and Non Agricultural Households Using a Multicriterial Approach," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 119(1), pages 183-195, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Edward N. Wolff & Ajit Zacharias & Thomas Masterson & Selçuk Eren & Andrew Sharpe & Elspeth Hazell, 2012. "A Comparison of Inequality and Living Standards in Canada and the United States Using an Expanded Measure of Economic Well-Being," CSLS Research Reports 2012-01, Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
    2. Edward N. Wolff & Ajit Zacharias & Hyunsub Kum & Robert Haveman, 2007. "Net Government Expenditures and the Economic Well-being of the Elderly in the United States, 1989–2001," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Dimitri B. Papadimitriou (ed.), Government Spending on the Elderly, chapter 4, pages 81-122, Palgrave Macmillan.
    3. Florin O. Bilbiie & Roland Straub, 2013. "Asset Market Participation, Monetary Policy Rules, and the Great Inflation," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(2), pages 377-392, May.
    4. Bilbiie, Florin O. & Straub, Roland, 2012. "Changes in the output Euler equation and asset markets participation," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 36(11), pages 1659-1672.
    5. Ron Crawford & Grant Johnston, 2004. "Household incomes in New Zealand: The impact of the market, taxes and government spending, 1987/88–1997/98," Treasury Working Paper Series 04/20, New Zealand Treasury.
    6. Benjamin Bridges JR, 1984. "Post-Fisc Distributions of Income: Comment," Public Finance Review, , vol. 12(2), pages 231-240, April.
    7. repec:rre:publsh:v:34:y:2004:i:2:p:137-55 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Bilbiie, Florin O., 2020. "The New Keynesian cross," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 90-108.
    9. Edward Wolff & Ajit Zacharias, 2009. "Household wealth and the measurement of economic well-being in the United States," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 7(2), pages 83-115, June.
    10. Edward N. Wolff & Ajit Zacharias, 2007. "The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being United States, 1989-2001," Eastern Economic Journal, Eastern Economic Association, vol. 33(4), pages 443-470, Fall.
    11. Melissa Holly Mahoney, 2013. "Inequity in American Schools: A New Perspective on the Distributional Effects of School Expenditures on Economic Well-Being," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 59(4), pages 728-755, December.
    12. Edward N. Wolff & Ajit Zacharias, 2003. "The Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being," Economics Working Paper Archive wp_372, Levy Economics Institute.
    13. Ali Enami & Nora Lustig & Rodrigo Aranda, 2016. "Analytic Foundations: Measuring the Redistributive Impact of Taxes and Transfers," Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Working Paper Series 25, Tulane University, Department of Economics.
    14. Ali Enami & Nora Lustig & Rodrigo Aranda, 2016. "Analytic Foundations: Measuring the Redistributive Impact of Taxes and Transfers," Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Working Paper Series 1325, Tulane University, Department of Economics.
    15. Lustig, Nora & Martinez Pabon, Valentina & Pessino, Carola, 2023. "Fiscal policy, income redistribution, and poverty reduction in Latin America," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 120683, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    16. Edward C. Kienzle, 1984. "Post-Fisc Distributions of Income: Reply," Public Finance Review, , vol. 12(2), pages 241-244, April.
    17. Daniel P. Hewitt, 1987. "The Benefit Incidence of Consumption Public Goods," Public Finance Review, , vol. 15(2), pages 138-165, April.
    18. Lukas Riedel & Holger Stichnoth, 2022. "Government Expenditure in the DINA Framework: Allocation Methods and Consequences for Post-Tax Income Inequality," Working Papers of BETA 2022-06, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    19. Hamid R. Davoodi & Erwin R Tiongson & Sawitree Sachjapinan Asawanuchit, 2010. "Benefit Incidence of Public Education and Health Spending Worldwide: Evidence From A New Database," Poverty & Public Policy, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 2(2), pages 5-52, May.
    20. Frick, Joachim R. & Grabka, Markus M. & Smeeding, Timothy M. & Tsakloglou, Panos, 2010. "Distributional Effects of Imputed Rents in Five European Countries," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 19(3), pages 167-179.
    21. Asena Caner & Ed Wolff, 2002. "Asset Poverty in the United States, 1984-1999: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics," Microeconomics 0209002, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    living standards; public consumption; household wealth; inequality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
    • D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics
    • H4 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • P17 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Performance and Prospects

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwppe:0309004. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: EconWPA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.