Abstract

We impute household-level consumption expenditure in Norway (2009-2023) using
administrative register data. Employing established methodologies, we decompose
income and net wealth changes into active savings and consumption expenditure. After excluding households with measurement challenges, we retain 86% of households. The contributions are twofold. First, we describe and implement a transparent framework for imputing consumption expenditure which can be updated as new register data becomes available. Our measure of consumption expenditure shows strong comovement with the National Accounts (correlation 0.9). Second, we illustrate how imputed consumption expenditure can be used to examine household heterogeneity across households and time. We document that consumption declined most among highly indebted households in 2023, reflecting higher interest expenses and weaker disposable income growth relative to other households. These results demonstrate how imputed consumption expenditure can be used to examine heterogeneity in household responses to changes in economic conditions.