Chetty, Hendren, Kline, Saez, Turner: Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? (2014)
The Point: The authors find that intergenerational mobility in the United States has not decreased over time (looking at birth cohorts from 1971-1993), despite the fact that inequality over this time period has increased. The Quote: "Envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children's chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not
Attanasio and Pistaferri: Consumption Inequality over the Last Half Century (2014)
The Point: Attanasio and Pistaferri introduce a new imputation method for analyzing consumption inequality in the US. Most studies of consumption inequality in the U.S. rely on data from the consumer expenditure survey (CEX), which provides comprehensive micro-level data starting in the 1980s, but the CEX data is not without problems. The imputation in this paper is based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which stretches back to the 1960s. The imputation
