This paper contributes to the debate regarding trends in consumption inequality in the United States. We present a new measure of consumption inequality based on the redesigned 1999–2011 PSID. We impute consumption to the families observed before 1999 using the more comprehensive consumption data available from 1999 onward. One advantage of this procedure is in sample verification of the quality of the imputation procedure; another is that it yields a long time series (1967–2010). Consumption inequality was stable in the 1970s, as was income inequality. It increased significantly after 1980. The Great Recession was associated with a decline in consumption inequality.
Authors
CPP Co-Director
Orazio is an International Research Fellow at the IFS, a Professor at Yale and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Stanford University
Journal article details
- DOI
- 10.1257/aer.104.5.122
- Publisher
- American Economic Association
- Issue
- May 2014
Suggested citation
Attanasio, O and Pistaferri, L. (2014). 'Consumption Inequality over the Last Half Century: Some Evidence Using the New PSID Consumption Measure' (2014)
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