The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro-level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand. To do this, the authors utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4,000 households in each of fifteen years. Employing a number of different...

A new and easily implementable framework for the empirical analysis of the relationship between aggregate and individual wages is developed. Aggregate real wages are shown to contain three important bias terms: one associated with the dispersion of individual wages, a second deriving from...

This paper addresses whether households save enough for their retirement. For successive date-of-birth cohorts the authors analyze income and expenditure patterns around the time of retirement. They find a fall in consumption as household heads retire which cannot be fully explained by a...

This paper examines the link between income and consumption inequality. We create panel data on consumption for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using an imputation procedure based on food demand estimates from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We document a disjuncture between income and...

The control function approach is a convenient method of estimation in simultaneous equation systems. This requires that the system can be expressed in triangular form with variables satisfying a conditional mean independence restriction. Linear simultaneous models with additive errors can always...

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time. We show how informative bounds can be developed on each of these margins. We apply this...