Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose error is plausibly independent of the measurement errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and...

We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that...

There are several ways to measure fatness and obesity, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The primary measure for tracking the prevalence of obesity has historically been body mass index (BMI). This paper compares long-run trends in the prevalence of obesity when obesity is defined...

Using the Census Bureau's internal March Current Population Surveys (CPS) file, we construct and make available variances and cell means for all topcoded income values in the public-use version of these data. We then provide a procedure that allows researchers with access only to the public-use...

Using the internal March CPS, we create and in this paper distribute to the larger research community a cell mean series that provides the mean of all income values above the topcode for any income source of any individual in the public use March CPS that has been topcoded since 1976. We also...

As an example of the value of fatness in predicting social science outcomes, we show that while BMI is positively correlated with the probability of employment disability in the PSID, when body mass is divided into its components, fatness is positively correlated with disability while fat-free...

Since 2012 the Congressional Budget Office has included an estimate of the market value of government-provided health insurance coverage in its measures of household income. We follow this practice for both public and private health insurance to capture the impact of greater access to...

Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez (2011) survey an important new literature using income tax-based data to measure the share of income held by top income groups. But changes in tax legislation that expand the tax base to include income sources (e.g. capital gains, dividends, etc.) disproportionately...

Recent research on United States levels and trends in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. Piketty and Saez (2003) examine market income of tax units based on IRS tax return data, DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith (2012) and most CPS-based research uses pre-tax,...

Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey...