IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jpolec/doi10.1086-721702.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Consumption and Income Inequality in the United States since the 1960s

Author

Listed:
  • Bruce D. Meyer
  • James X. Sullivan

Abstract

Recent research concludes that the rise in consumption inequality mirrors, or even exceeds, the rise in income inequality. We revisit this finding, constructing improved measures of consumption, focusing on its well-measured components that are reported at a high and stable rate relative to national accounts. While overall income inequality rose over the past 5 decades, the rise in overall consumption inequality was small. The declining quality of income data likely contributes to these differences for the bottom of the distribution. Asset price changes likely account for some of the differences in recent years for the top of the distribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruce D. Meyer & James X. Sullivan, 2023. "Consumption and Income Inequality in the United States since the 1960s," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 131(2), pages 247-284.
  • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/721702
    DOI: 10.1086/721702
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/721702
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/721702
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/721702?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Martha J. Bailey & Leah Platt Boustan & William J. Collins, 2024. "Introduction to "The Economic History of American Inequality: New Evidence and Perspectives"," NBER Chapters, in: The Economic History of American Inequality: New Evidence and Perspectives, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Alexandre Gaillard & Christian Hellwig & Philipp Wangner & Nicolas Werquin, 2023. "Consumption, Wealth, and Income Inequality: A Tale of Tails," Working Paper Series WP 2023-43, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    3. Jonathan Heathcote & Fabrizio Perri & Giovanni Violante & Lichen Zhang, 2023. "More Unequal We Stand? Inequality Dynamics in the United States, 1967–2021," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 50, pages 235-266, October.
    4. Masaru INABA & Kengo NUTAHARA & Daichi SHIRAI, 2023. "Sources of Inequality and Business Cycles: Evidence from the US and Japan," CIGS Working Paper Series 23-006E, The Canon Institute for Global Studies.
    5. Ghosh, Anisha & Theloudis, Alexandros, 2023. "Consumption Partial Insurance in the Presence of Tail Income Risk," Other publications TiSEM c8da0a17-57cb-40bf-ab61-6, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    More about this item

    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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/721702. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE .

    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.