Using international holdings data, we estimate a demand system for financial assets across 36 countries. The demand system provides a unified framework for decomposing variation in exchange rates, long-term yields, and stock prices; interpreting major economic events such as the European...

This paper presents an (S,s) model for automobile consumption and estimates it using a data set of US households. The model allows for unobserved heterogeneity in both the target level and the band width, takes into account the possibility of a zero desired level, constrains the band to be non...

I give conditions under which changes in private spending are accommodated in general equilibrium exactly like changes in aggregate fiscal expenditure. Under such demand equivalence, researchers can use time series evidence on fiscal multipliers to recover the general equilibrium "missing...

This paper examines demand systems where the demand for a good depends only on its own price, consumer income, and a single aggregator synthesizing information on all other prices. This generalizes directly-separable preferences where the Lagrange multiplier provides such an aggregator. As...

A recent literature considers the identification of heterogeneous demand and supply models via "quasi-experimental'' variation, as from instrumental variables. In this paper we establish nonparametric identification of differentiated products demand when one has "micro data'' linking...

Models of consumer behavior play a key role in modern empirical Industrial Organization. In this paper, I survey some of the models used in this literature. In particular, I discuss two commonly used demand systems: multi-stage budgeting approaches and discrete choice models. I motivate their...

This paper has two objectives. First, we identify a problem with the ability of the discrete-continuous choice (DCC) framework and conditional demand functions to fully describe consumer preferences in the presence of kinked budget constraints. Second, we propose and illustrate an alternative,...

This paper examines the construction of a price index based on an estimated demand system. In principle the method examined can produce a price index that accounts for introduction of new products and quality changes in existing products. However, I isolate two key assumptions that have to be...

We develop a new approach to measuring the cost of living for constant elasticity of substitution (CES) preferences. Our approach allows for demand shocks for individual goods (to rationalize micro data) while preserving a money-metric expenditure function (to compare the cost of living over...