David Johnson is a nonresident senior fellow with Brookings Economic Studies program and executive director of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth. Prior to that, he served as a study director for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) for a report, Creating an Integrated System of Data and Statistics on Household Income, Consumption, and Wealth. Prior to NASEM, he was director of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and a research professor in the Survey Research Center and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. As the director of the PSID, he led efforts to improve the survey and promote its use.
He also served for 25 years in the federal statistical system, where he was the only senior executive to have leadership roles at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the U.S. Census Bureau. At the Census Bureau he led the implementation of the Supplemental Poverty Measure, and the re-engineering of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. His research focuses on measurement, whether it is poverty, inequality, prices, mobility, equivalence scales or consumption. His views on the importance of measurement are presented in his Presidential Address for the Association of Public Policy and Management (APPAM). His research has been published in a variety of journals including the American Economic Review, Review of Income and Wealth, Journal of Macroeconomics, and Demography. His current research projects are evaluating intergenerational mobility in income, consumption and wealth, price indexes using transactions data, and the consumption response to the economic impact payments. He recently served as Past President of APPAM and on the Research Advisory Board of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.Â