The Distribution of Income and Consumption Using Linked Data

Music City Center 

We examine income and consumption-based measures of well-being and are the first to conduct such analyses using linked expenditure and administrative income data. Our income measures relying on combined, or "blended", survey and administrative data compare much more closely to those of expenditure measures. This is especially true for the very bottom of the distribution, where prior research has revealed concerns about the underreporting of survey income. Blended income deep poverty tends to be very close to consumption-based deep poverty measures, closing almost all of the existing gap in deep poverty rates measured using survey-reported income and consumption.