Current Work on the Distributional Analysis of Household Income Resulting From Policy Changes: Working Paper 2022-09
Working Paper
This paper introduces a standardized framework to analyze how policy changes alter the distribution of household income to complement CBO’s analyses of policy changes’ budgetary and economic effects.
The Congressional Budget Office developed a framework to further standardize analyses of the distribution of household income and to complement analyses of policy changes’ budgetary and economic effects. This paper introduces that analytical framework and describes the agency’s current methods, along with examples.
This paper discusses the analytical choices that CBO plans to make in its distributional analyses of policy changes and notes how different choices could affect the analysis. Also discussed are the inherently difficult choices associated with conducting such analyses. Finally, the paper highlights areas where additional research would be useful and where lack of available data presents challenges for distributional analysis.
