Suchergebnisse

Since 2012, the Congressional Budget Office has included an estimate of the market value of government‐provided health insurance coverage in its measures of household income. We follow this practice for both public and private health insurance to capture the impact of greater access to government‐provided health insurance for working‐age people with disabilities, whose market value rose in 2010 dollars from $11.7 billion in 1980 to $114.3 billion in 2012. We then consider the more general implications of incorporating estimates of the market price of insurance, equivalent to that provided by the government, into policy analyses in a post‐Affordable Care Act world. (JEL D31, H24, I18, J31)

Recent research on levels and trends in the United States in income inequality vary substantially in how they measure income. We show the sensitivity of alternative income measures in capturing income trends using a unified data set. Focusing solely on market income or including realized taxable capital gains based on IRS tax return data in more comprehensive household income measures will dramatically increase inequality growth compared to capital gains measures more in keeping with Haig-Simons principles. Using a measure of yearly accrued capital gains dramatically reduces observed growth in income inequality across the distribution, but also equalizes income growth since 1989.

A substantial part of the U.S. inequality literature focuses on yearly levels and trends in pre‐tax, post‐transfer cash income and its distribution over time and finds that median income appears to be stagnating, with income growth primarily coming at higher income levels. When we use data from the Current Population Survey for 1995–2008 and add the value of employer‐ and government‐provided health insurance coverage, not only does it increase the upward trend in the level of resources controlled by Americans, but also reduces the level of inequality in these resources and its upward trend. We then provide a highly stylized example of this broader income measure's value in capturing the impact of two key provisions of the Affordable Care Act of 2010—an expansion in Medicaid and the provision of subsidies to lower‐income families for purchasing private coverage on state‐run exchanges. Even though these incremental expansions build on existing systems of government‐provided health insurance, we find that the vast majority of the benefits would still accrue to the bottom three deciles of the income distribution when we include the value of employer‐ and government‐provided health insurance in our expanded yearly income measure. (JEL D31, H51, I14)

AbstractUnemployment Insurance (UI) benefits were a central part of the social safety net during the COVID‐19 recession. UI benefits, however, are severely understated in surveys. Using administrative tax data, we find that over half of UI benefits were missed in major survey data, with a greater understatement among low‐income workers. As a result, 2020 official poverty rates were overstated by about 2 percentage points, and corrected poverty reached a six‐decade low. We provide data to correct underreporting in surveys and show that, compared to UI benefits, the UI exclusion tax expenditure was less targeted at low incomes.