We investigate life cycle patterns of demand for services from household durables using UK panel data. We take careful account of prices, demographics, labour supply and health. Demand for consumer electronics rises with age, while the demand for household appliances is flat. These findings...

Household-level data on consumer expenditures underpins a wide range of empirical research in modern economics, spanning micro- and macroeconomics. This research includes work on consumption and saving, on poverty and inequality, and on risk sharing and insurance. We review different ways in...

Household-level data on consumer expenditures underpin a wide range of empirical research in modern economics, spanning micro- and macroeconomics. This research includes work on consumption and saving, on poverty and inequality, and on risk sharing and insurance. We review different ways in...

We investigate how households in temporarily straitened circumstances due to an unemployment spell cut back on expenditures and how they spend marginal dollars of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit. Our theoretical and empirical analyses emphasize the importance of allowing for the fact that...

A central implication of life-cycle models is that agents smooth consumption. We review the empirical evidence on smoothing at frequencies from within the year up to across a lifetime. We find that life-cycle models--particular those which incorporate realistic features of markets and...

We show that (Marshallian) income elasticities are proportional to (Frisch) own price elasticities if all goods are additively separable. This implies that luxuries are likely to be easier to postpone. It also implies that preferences over "consumption" are unlikely to display a constant...

If access to credit is limited (especially when young or unemployed) but "bad" jobs are easy to come by, then job seekers might use short term employment in undesirable jobs as a way to finance consumption during subsequent unemployed search for a "good" job. In this paper we explore this idea...