Recent research has demonstrated that some households cut back on expenditures in an unemployment spell. Moreover, some of these households respond to variation in the transitory income provided by unemployment insurance benefits. This suggests that these households are constrained in the sense...

In many research areas it is desirable to have information on household total expenditure (‘consumption’). We draw evidence from several sources on the usefulness of recall consumption questions. We conclude that valid information can be collected by adding specific recall questions to...

This paper investigates the search and consumption behavior of workers as they move between readily available low wage employment and uncertain search for a high wage job. Analytic results derived from our model include: (1) voluntary planned quits occur in a cyclical pattern, (2) consumption...

There are extensive literatures within economics and economic psychology on the allocation of household income within the household. These two literatures are largely disjoint but both use a concept of ‘income pooling’. In economics this refers to the independence of household decisions from...

Presented at the 2005 Econometric Society World Congress Plenary Session on "Modelling Heterogeneity". We survey the treatment of heterogeneity in applied microeconometrics analyses. There are three themes. First, there is usually much more heterogeneity than empirical researchers allow for....

This paper uses revealed preference inequalities to provide tight nonparametric bounds on consumer responses to price changes. Price responses are allowed to vary nonparametrically across the income distribution by exploiting micro data on consumer expenditures and incomes over a finite set of...

Most econometric schemes to allow for heterogeneity in micro behaviour have two drawbacks: they do not fit the data and they rule out interesting economic models. In this paper we consider the time homogeneous first order Markov (HFOM) model that allows for maximal heterogeneity. That is, the...

We employ a regression-discontinuity design to identify effects on educational attainment (years of education) of class size and the number of pupils per weekly teacher hour using administrative rules as instruments. We use a Danish administrative panel data set based on a 10% random sample of...

Several recent papers have concluded that precautionary saving motives are needed to reconcile data on lifetime patterns of consumption and income with a standard optimising model. In this paper we contest that we necessarily need a precautionary motive and we show that if we take consumption to...

There is widespread agreement that given currently available data, we cannot accurately estimate the parameters of intertemporal allocation using GMM on Euler equations, whether they be exact or approximate. Our reading of this literature and our own results is that this is a small sample...