TY  - JOUR
AU  - Attanasio,Orazio
AU  - Battistin,Erich
AU  - Ichimura,Hidehiko
TI  - What Really Happened to Consumption Inequality in the US?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10338
PY  - 2004
Y2  - March 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10338
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10338.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Orazio Attanasio
Department of Economics
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
UNITED KINGDOM
Tel: 44/20-76795880
Fax: 44/20-79162775
E-Mail: o.attanasio@ucl.ac.uk

Erich Battistin
The Institute for Fiscal Studies
7 Ridgmount Street
London WC1E 7AE
E-Mail: erich@stat.unipd.it

Hidehiko Ichimura
Graduate School of Economics
University of Tokyo
Hongo 7-3-1
Tokyo 113-0033
Japan
E-Mail: ichimura@e.u-tokyo.ac.jp
AB  - This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States. The Interview sample follows survey households over four calendar quarters and consists of retrospectively collected information about monthly expenditures on durable and non-durable goods. The Diary sample interviews household for two consecutive weeks and includes detailed information about frequently purchased items (food, personal cares and household supplies). Most reliable information from each sample is exploited to derive a correction for the measurement error affecting observed measures of consumption inequality in the two surveys. We find that consumption inequality, as measured by the standard deviation of log non-durable consumption, has increased by roughly 5% points during the 1990s.
ER  -