Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and the Survey of Consumer … earnings, to disposable income, and, ultimately, to consumption and wealth. We document a continuous and sizable increase in … before 1982, but mitigate its increase thereafter. Taxes and transfers compress the level of income inequality, especially at …

The rise in within-group consumption inequality in response to the increase in within-group income inequality over the …

Deaton (1986) has noted that if income is a first-order autoregressive process in first differences, then a simple … version of Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis (SPIH) implies that measured U.S. consumption is insufficiently sensitive to … innovations in income. This paper argues that this implication of the SPIH is a consequence of the fact that it ignores the role …

the permanent income model that are consistent with this fact. In both variants, we assume agents make decisions on a … income. According to the second variant of the permanent income model, serial persistence in measured consumption reflects … like a martingale. We find little evidence against this variance of the permanent income model. It is difficult, on the …