ERC Synergy Grant awarded to the project “Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts”

The World Inequality Lab is glad to announce that the project “Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts” has been awarded the ERC Synergy Grant from the European Research Council! It will be jointly run by three research centers : the University of Oxford, the University of California Berkeley, and the World Inequality Lab (Paris School of Economics), in association with the OECD. The team includes Brian Nolan (University of Oxford), Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (University of California, Berkeley), and Thomas Piketty as the principal investigator (World Inequality Lab – Paris School of Economics), with support from Facundo Alvaredo and Lucas Chancel (World Inequality Lab).

Summary of the project: Towards a System of Distributional National Accounts

This project aims at implementing a renovated approach to the measurement of income and wealth inequality consistent with macro aggregates, i.e macroeconomic national accounts. It should help the researchers to rebuild the bridges between distributional data available from micro sources and national accounts aggregates in a systematic way. This is the main goal pursued through DINA-Distributional National Accounts where the analysis of growth and inequality can be carried out in a coherent framework. This endeavour also involves the production of synthetic micro-files, providing information on income and wealth, which will also be made available online. Those micro-files focus on individual level data that are not necessarily the result of direct observation but come from estimations that reproduce the observed distribution of the underlying data, including the joint distribution of age, gender, numbers of dependent children, income and wealth between adult individuals.

The global aim is to release income and wealth synthetic DINA micro-files for all countries on an annual basis. Such data will certainly play a critical role in the public debate, and will be used as a resource for further analysis by various actors in civil society and in the academic, business and political communities.

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About the system of Distributional National Accounts

Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Distributional National Accounts Guidelines: Methods and Concepts Used in WID.world, December 2016.

The European Research Council

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