The paper discusses the importance of decreasing mortality in explaining demographic change over the last century. A two-sex overlapping generations model is used where care both for children and the elderly is modeled. Assuming that the main costs of care are tied to time use (and thereby...

Common intuition and experimental psychology suggest that the ability to self-regulate ("willpower") is a depletable resource. We investigate the behavior of an agent with limited willpower who optimally consumes over time an endowment of a tempting and storable consumption good or "cake". We...

Italy and Norway are characterized by different household patterns of young adults, with young Italians being more likely to live in their parents' house and young Norwegians more likely to live independently, alone or in multi-occupant households. This paper asks why, and how these differences...

Estimating the effect of background risk on individual financial choices faces two challenges. First, the identification of the marginal effect requires a measure of at least one component of human capital risk that qualifies as "background" (a risk that an individual cannot diversify or avoid)....

This paper looks at individual risk behavior and disability in Vietnam, where many households live with a disabled family member. Due to the Vietnam war, disability is a common phenomenon and shapes individuals' daily life and decision making. Using longitudinal data of 2200 households in...

A complete system of consumer expenditure functions with 28 commodity groups is modelled and estimated by means of Norwegian household panel data. Measurement errors are carefully modelled. Total consumption expenditure is modelled as a latent variable, purchase expenditures on different goods...

In this paper, a subsystem of demand equations is estimated using data from the Norwegian survey of household expenditures 1989-1991. One objective has been to obtain substantial knowledge of Norwegian household demand for a set of food groups, with emphasis on price responses, using two...

Measuring change in the price of housing is an important and notoriously difficult task for national statistical agencies. Different approaches have been attempted, but suffer from known weaknesses. This article suggests dividing housing outlays into consumption and saving. The changes in prices...

Heterogeneity in consumer behaviour creates differences in demand responses, which may create problems with aggregation across consumers. If aggregation problems exist, results from estimation based on aggregate data may prove difficult to interpret. Using estimation results from micro data to...

In the aggregation literature, prices and price and income derivatives are often assumed not to vary across consumers. These assumptions may not be fulfilled: prices often vary and consumers are heterogeneous in the way they respond to price and income changes. In this paper we develop and...