Simplified Distributional National Accounts

Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

PSE Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) (hereafter PSZ) propose a method to distribute total national income across individual adults in the United States. The method has recently been applied to a number of countries as reviewed in the World Inequality Report 2018 (Alvaredo et al. 2018). The key advantage relative to earlier work using fiscal income such as Piketty and Saez (2003) or survey data is that the national income concept is comprehensive, homogeneous over time, and comparable across countries. In particular, distributional national income statistics can be used to study both growth and inequality in a consistent framework that aggregates cleanly to national income from national accounts. In contrast, fiscal income or survey income aggregates display growth levels that are quite different from national income growth both in the short-term year-to-year fluctuations and in the long-term growth rates averaged over decades (see PSZ for a detailed discussion).

Keywords: Simplified Distributional National Accounts; DINA; Distribution; National income; United States World Inequality Lab (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://pjse.hal.science/hal-02877005v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://pjse.hal.science/hal-02877005v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Simplified Distributional National Accounts (2019)
Working Paper: Simplified Distributional National Accounts (2019)
Working Paper: Simplified Distributional National Accounts (2019)
Working Paper: Simplified Distributional National Accounts (2019)
Working Paper: Simplified Distributional National Accounts (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:psewpa:hal-02877005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PSE Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().