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December 1994

CE data: quintiles of income versus quintiles of outlays

John M. Rogers, Maureen B. Gray

Classifying data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey by quintiles of outlays may be a better indicator of consumers' economic well-being than classifying the same data by quintiles of income. This article examines quintiles of expenditures data as an alternative measure of sorting CE data, which indicates that consumer units in the lowest income quartile are not necessarily the same consumer units in the lowest outlays quintile.

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