This paper empirically tests the validity of using only mean income as a representative variable for the whole population in the aggregate consumption relation and of assuming time-invariance of the coefficients in this relation, as done in macromodels. We use a statistical distributional...

This paper attempts to find out the explanatory power of observed changes in the distribution of current income in explaining the relative change in aggregate consumption using the distributional approach of aggregation by Hildenbrand and Kneip (1999, 2001). The coefficients in the aggregate...

This paper sheds new light on the interactions between business cycles and the consumption distribution. We use Consumer Expenditure Survey data and a factor model to characterize the cyclical dynamics of the consumption distribution. We first establish that our approach is able to closely match...

A stochastic discrete choice model and its related estimation method are presented which allow to disentangle non-linear externalities from the intrinsic features of the objects of choice and from the idiosyncratic preferences of agents. Having veried for the ergodicity of the underlying...