U.S. Participation in the Development of LIS, a Transnational Database: Luxembourg Income Study Database and Luxembourg Wealth Study Database, 2024-2028

This project provides continuing support for U.S. participation in LIS, the cross-national data archive and research center. LIS is an indispensable, multi-country data infrastructure for understanding the social and economic wellbeing of people in today’s globalized world. LIS maintains two social science databases—the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database and the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database—for the purposes of enabling and fostering cross-national research on socio-economic outcomes in high- and middle-income countries.

The current project adds new datasets to both the LIS and LWS Databases on a continual basis. The project also includes a pilot study on including top-end adjustments to the income and wealth series, as well as an assessment of the feasibility of a new database, tentatively titled the “Luxembourg Consumption Study (LCS) Database,” populated with consumption datasets from many countries.

Thousands of researchers worldwide—10,000 to date—use the LIS and LWS Databases to analyze outcomes including poverty, income inequality, employment disparities, gender inequality, family structure, wealth portfolios, asset levels, and the interplay between household income and wealth. This ever-growing body of research informs decision-making about income and wealth distributions in the United States and around the world.

The project harmonizes datasets from many countries, which include microdata on income, wealth, employment, and demography; provides a means to access data that would otherwise be unavailable to individual researchers due to privacy restrictions; creates a remote-execution system that quickly sends research query results back to users off-site; and promotes the use of microdata in comparative research on socio-economic wellbeing. By providing an infrastructure with data from geographically and economically diverse countries, LIS broadens the intellectual basis for interdisciplinary research using household microdata.

LIS maintains the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database and the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS) Database, which together cover more than 80% of the world’s GDP and 2/3 of its population. LIS acquires, harmonizes, and documents survey-based datasets from around the globe; these include income, employment, and demographic variables at the person- and household-level.

The LIS Database includes microdata from 55 countries, with nearly 700 datasets spanning 1968 to 2019; the newer LWS Database contains 75 wealth datasets from 19 countries and covers 1995 to 2019. LIS maintains standardized national indicators on household inequality and poverty, and metadata are available on the surveys, harmonization, and country-specific institutions.

LIS provides online learning materials, user support, and training workshops, as well as a Working Paper Series, a Visiting Scholar Program, LIS-based conferences, and public programs. LIS serves thousands of researchers worldwide, from various disciplines, including economics, sociology, political science, policy studies, and public health. Users come from academia, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, supranational organizations, and news agencies; over one-fifth of registered and active users are based in the United States.

The current project continues to broaden LIS’ impact beyond academia by expanding collaborations, communicating through various media, and continuing to enhance its data visualization capacity.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.