The Missing Consumer Expenditure Surveys

This award funds an effort to create a database from historical records on consumer expenditures linked to publicly available records from the Census Bureau. The data will be widely available to researchers and the public at no cost. The research team will use these data themselves for several studies that will examine the evolution of living standards during the post WWII period. This is a period where the U.S. experienced growth in household incomes and a decrease in income inequality, but we do not know if these changes in the income distribution across different groups of Americans resulted in more equality in consumption and living standards. Modern micro data on consumer expenditures has proven to be enormously valuable over a wide variety of fields in economics. This new data set will allow researchers to extend the time period under study. The project will also contribute to research on how to best construct price indices, since the results will help us understand how consumption patterns have diverged across demographic groups over time. The data will be valuable to economists, social scientists, statisticians, and policymakers interested in the measurement of living standards. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.