A Note on the Size Distribution of Consumption: More Double Pareto than Lognormal

This paper used to be a section of Toda & Walsh (2015), in which we documented that the cross-sectional distribution of household consumption is double Pareto-lognormally distributed. The JPE editor asked us to cut this section to make the paper shorter. Obviously, I intended to write another joint paper with Kieran, but because I did the entire analysis for this section, Kieran recused himself from the project and I recycled the section as a standalone paper.

I submitted this paper to MD in December 2014. I got an easy R&R in April 2015 and submitted the revision in two days. Then I didn’t hear anything back for a long time, so in September 2015 I asked the editor about the status, who replied to me that I can withdraw the submission if I think it is taking too long. The paper was accepted in October 2015 but it took until 2017 to be included in an issue. I thought MD is not run efficiently, so I never submitted a paper again.