What is the role of transport improvements in globalization? We argue that the nineteenth century is the ideal testing ground: maritime freight rates fell on average by 50% while global trade increased 400% from 1870 to 1913. We estimate the first indices of bilateral freight rates and directly...

Pashardes (1991) and Banks et al. (1994) use parametric methods to estimate lifetime equivalence scales. Their approaches put parametric restrictions on the differences in within-period expenditure needs across household types, the intertemporal allocation of expenditure, and the shapes of...

Investigating the earnings and income disparity faced by Aboriginal people in Canada from 1995 to 2005, we find that Aboriginal people face substantial income and earnings gaps in comparison with Canadian-born majority-group workers with similar characteristics (such as age and education). The...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify because consumption is measured at the household level and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided up...

We consider two econometric problems in the measurement of poverty, both relating to rent imputation. First, we account for quality differences correlated with selection into owneroccupied versus rental tenure. This correction increases estimated household consumption by 5% over uncorrected...

Collective household models posit that each household member has access to a fraction of the household budget, called a resource share, which defines the shadow budget faced by a household member. Together with the within-household shadow price vector, the shadow budget determines the material...

The existence of glass ceilings and sticky floors suggests that disadvantaged workers will be under-represented in some parts of the income distribution, and over-represented in others. We present a representation index that measures the prevalence of population subgroups in different regions of...

Microdata concerning consumer demand typically show considerable variation in real expenditures, but very little variation in prices. We propose a semiparametric strategy for the consumer demand problem in which expenditure share equations are estimated nonparametrically in the real expenditure...