"The Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) provide a quarterly measure of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, based on a comprehensive integration of disaggregated household-level wealth data with official aggregate wealth measures.…"More data.
Abstract:
This paper develops a simplified methodology that starts from the fiscal income top income share series and makes very basic assumptions on how each income component from national income that is not included in fiscal income is distributed. This simplified methodology has two main goals.
First and most important, it can be used to create distributional national income statistics in countries where fiscal income inequality statistics are available but where there is limited information to impute other income at the individual level. Alvaredo et al. (2016) distributional national accounts guidelines proposed a simplified methodology for countries with less data (Section 7). The methodology proposed here can be seen as an even simpler method that can be applied to countries for which fiscal income top income share statistics exist1 and for which national accounts and fiscal income aggregates are sufficiently detailed.
Second, this simplified methodology can also be used to assess the plausibility of the Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) assumptions. In particular, we will show that the simplified methodology can be used to show that the alternative assumptions proposed by Auten and Splinter (2018) imply a drastic equalization of income components not in fiscal income which does not seem realistic.
FRED now has 70 years of quarterly national accounts data for the United States, which is an opportunity to look back at how the U.S. economy may have changed since 1947. In the graph above, we look at the three main expenditure components of real gross national product: real consumption, real investment, and real government expenses. They’re normalized to 100 for the first quarter of 1947, to make them more comparable....FRED Blog
A slew of research into economic inequality replete with serious looking graphs may give the impression that measuring inequality in the United States is a solved problem. This is misleading. Inequality is still measured incompletely because existing U.S. government statistics do not attempt to match their estimates to the National Income and Product Accounts. NIPA is the source of the most reported and well-understood economic statistics such as the nation’s Gross Domestic Product and quarterly GDP growth figures.
Because existing estimates of economic inequality are not pegged to NIPA, they don’t account for all sources of income. They may exclude, for example, fringe benefits provided by employers such as employer-provided health insurance and retirement benefits, government transfers such as supplemental nutrition assistance or the child tax credit, government services such as public education, and tax expenditures such as the home mortgage tax deduction and tax breaks for employer-provided insurance. These exclusions, big and small, make many existing estimates of inequality fundamentally incomparable to our most well-established measures of economic growth....Important analysis from the POV of stock-flow consistency follows. Efforts are underway to improve measurement to bring estimates of income in line with national income accounting in order to remove the inconsistencies arrive at a better understanding of income and wealth distribution in the US.
The ability to look at the geographic distribution of inequality and at slices of income within different income groups teases the possibilities of a more robust project to disaggregate the National Income and Product Accounts statistics that are currently the most referenced statistics of economic progress in the nation. Devoting federal resources to the project could allow us to track inequality not only by income bands, but also by age, geographic location, gender, ethnicity, and type of income.WCEG — The Equitablog
Summary. One of the most influential critics of the ideas of Piketty is Matthew Rognlie – who, to be able to write down his criticisms and following the national accounts, reintroduced the idea of ‘land’, or unproduced inputs like land and natural resources including land underlying buildings, in a neoclassical world. Herewith he undid the work of John Bates Clark, who purged ‘land’ from the concept of capital of classical economics, therewith enabling the rise of neoclassical economics. But this is not the only example of the return of land into economic discourse – land has made quite a return.…Real-World Economics Review Blog
Here's the abstract for a paper I recently completed on Off-Balance-Sheet Federal Liabilities:
Much attention has been given to the recent growth of the U.S. federal debt. This paper examines the growth of federal liabilities that are not included in the officially reported numbers. These take the form of implicit or explicit government guarantees and commitments. The five major categories surveyed include support for housing, other loan guarantees, deposit insurance, actions taken by the Federal Reserve, and government trust funds. The total dollar value of notional off-balance-sheet commitments came to $70 trillion as of 2012, or 6 times the size of the reported on-balance-sheet debt. The paper reviews the potential costs and benefits of these off-balance-sheet commitments and their role in precipitating or mitigating the financial crisis of 2008.
What follows is a brief summary of the paper....Econobrower
These off-balance-sheet concerns may or may not translate into significant on-balance-sheet problems. But one thing seems undeniable-- they are huge. And implicit or explicit commitments of such a huge size have the potential to have huge economic consequences, perhaps for the better, perhaps for the worse.It's possible that the sky will fall, but it could also be an especially nice time. Thanks for the weather report.
