Lab Director Moritz Kuhn, together with Christian Bayer and Luis Calderon, has developed a new method to measure how the joint distribution of household consumption, income, and wealth evolves at a quarterly frequency.

The approach combines information from five major U.S. household surveys, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), and Current Population Survey (CPS), together with macroeconomic time series in a unified statistical framework. It produces quarterly estimates of the joint distribution of consumption, income, and wealth from 1962 to 2024, capturing changes in both the marginal distributions and the dependence between these variables.

On a dedicated webpage, they make the resulting distributional time series and their dynamics available for download. The website includes the complete quarterly time series, synthetic microdata, measures of uncertainty, and additional estimation output. We hope these new data will be widely used for empirical research, model validation, and the development of quantitative theories of heterogeneity.