This paper combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution...

Medical-care expenditures have been rising rapidly, accounting for over 17 percent of GDP in 2012. In this study, we assess the sources of the rising medical-care expenditures in the commercial sector. We employ a novel framework for decomposing expenditure growth into four components at the...

Given the challenges in quantifying the role of human capital on economic development, measuring human capital itself becomes an important issue. It is desirable to have a comprehensive human capital measure that goes beyond the traditional measures based on education attainment, yet is...

We perform a quantitative analysis of observed changes in U.S. between-group inequality between 1984 and 2003. We use an assignment framework with many labor groups, equipment types, and occupations in which changes in inequality are caused by changes in workforce composition, occupation demand,...

A recent "revisionist " literature characterizes the pronounced rise in U.S. wage inequality since 1980 as an "episodic " event of the first-half of the 1980s driven by non-market factors (particularly a falling real minimum wage) and concludes that continued increases in wage inequality since...

Variance decompositions of the Mexico-United States real exchange rate are examined using monthly data on consumer prices and the nominal exchange rate for the period January, 1969 to February, 2000. The results show that the robust result found in industrial-country data that most of the...

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under...

A recent literature has advanced the use of Engel curves to estimate overall CPI bias. In this paper, I show that the methodology is sensitive to the modeling of household demography. Existing estimates of CPI bias do not account for the changing effect of household size on budget shares, and...