TY - JOUR AU - Krueger,Dirk AU - Perri,Fabrizio AU - Pistaferri,Luigi AU - Violante,Giovanni L. TI - Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15554 PY - 2009 Y2 - December 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15554 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15554.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Dirk Krueger Department of Economics University of Pennsylvania 3718 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104 Tel: 215/898-6691 Fax: 215/573-2057 E-Mail: dkrueger@econ.upenn.edu Fabrizio Perri University of Minnesota Department of Economics 4-177 Hanson Hall Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel: 612/625-7504 Fax: 612/624-0209 E-Mail: fperri@umn.edu Luigi Pistaferri Department of Economics 579 Serra Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6072 Tel: 650/724-4904 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: pista@stanford.edu Giovanni L. Violante Department of Economics New York University 19 W. 4th Street New York, NY 10012-1119 Tel: 212/992-9771 Fax: 212/995-3932 E-Mail: glv2@nyu.edu AB - This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists''. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality, including wages, labor earnings, income, consumption, and wealth. After describing the motivation and the common methodology underlying this empirical project, we discuss selected results, with an emphasis on cross-country comparisons. Most, but not all, countries experienced substantial increases in wages and earnings inequality, over the last three decades. While the trend in the skill premium differed widely across countries, the experience premium rose and the gender premium fell virtually everywhere. At a higher frequency, earnings inequality appears to be strongly counter-cyclical. In all countries, government redistribution through taxes and transfers reduced the level, the trend and the cyclical fluctuations in income inequality. The rise in income inequality was stronger at the bottom of the distribution. Consumption inequality increased less than disposable income inequality, and tracked the latter much more closely at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. Measuring the age-profile of inequality is challenging because of the interplay of time and cohort effects. ER -