Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attracted international attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncover the factors which may be driving the emergence of the gender gaps. Drawing on household expenditure data from a poor (Sichuan) and rich...

This paper sets out a general algorithm for calculating true cost-of-living indices or true producer price indices when demand is not homothetic, i.e. when not all expenditure elasticities are equal to one. In principle, economic theory tells us how we should calculate a true cost-of-living...

This article introduces the Emergency Purchasing Situation (EPS) as a distinct buying context. EPSs stem from an unexpected event (unanticipated need or timing of a need), as well as high product importance, which are associated with a short time frame for consumer decision-making. Our...

The analysis in this paper focuses on the impact of health on the savings and consumption decisions of the elderly. In principle, there are at least five alternative channels through which health may affect consumption and savings. Ill health may affect both consumption capacities and needs...

We consider an exchange economy with time-inconsistent consumers whose preferences are additively separable. When these consumers trade in a sequence of markets, their time-inconsistency may introduce a non-convexity that gives them an incentive to trade lotteries. If there are many consumers,...

This paper shows that the two main models in the buffer stock saving literature can be nested in a model that varies the level of available social insurance. Equivalently, the assumption about the time series process for labor income (and social insurance during unemployment) is crucial in...

Which pricing kernel restrictions are needed to make low dimensional Markov models consistent with given sets of predictions on aggregate stock-market fluctuations ? This paper develops theoretical test conditions addressing this and related reverse engineering issues arising within a fairly...

Time discounting is at the heart of economic decision-making. We disentangle hyperbolic discounting from subjective time perception using experimental data from incentive-compatible tests to measure time preferences, and a set of experimental tasks to measure time perception. The two behavioural...

Are households more likely to be homeowners when “housing risk” is higher? We show that home-ownership rates and loan-to-value (LTV) ratios at the city level are strongly negatively correlated with local house price volatility. However, causal inference is confounded by house price levels,...

This paper uses data from the British Household Panel Survey and the Attitudes to Inheritances Survey to estimate the magnitude of and the factors that are correlated with private inter-household transfers from parents to their adult children in the UK. Our evidence suggests that inter vivos...