Progress on developing statistics and data on the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in the statistical agencies.

Music City Center 

Building on the National Academies of Sciences report, Creating an Integrated System of Data and Statistics on Household Income, Consumption and Wealth: Time to Build, we review the major income, consumption, and wealth statistics currently produced by U.S. statistical agencies, and provides guidance for modernizing the information to better inform policy and research (such as understanding trends in inequality and mobility). We demonstrate the progress that has been made by the agencies in improving statistics on the distributions of personal income and personal consumption expenditures and the distributional financial accounts. We document the importance of blending multiple data sources, including surveys, state and federal administrative records, and commercial data, and present alternative methods to produce an integrated data system, and discuss the important blended data products to estimates after tax and transfer income at the Census Bureau. We further discuss pilot studies that are building blended data using tax records, survey data, and building consumption from income and savings using the budget identity. Finally, we provide examples of agency efforts to create joint distributions of income, consumption and wealth, and how these data can be used in research and policy.