Data on consumption expenditure of the household is essential in a wide array of economic research. This includes both topics in micro as well as macroeconomics. However, obtaining a consistent and precise measure of household consumption has proven notoriously difficult. This paper documents a...

A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have...

Interest in the emergence of a global middle class has resulted in a number of attempts to identify and enumerate who belongs to it . Current research provides wildly different estimates about the size and evolution of the global middle class because of a lack of consensus on appropriate...

Differences in individual wealth holdings are widely viewed as a driving force of economic inequality. However, as this finding relies on cross-section data, we may confuse older with wealthier. We propose a new method to adjust for age effects in cross-sections, which eliminates transitory...

This paper examines the substitution between pension wealth and household saving by studying Norway's 2011 pension reform. The analysis identifies the effect of reductions in social security pension generosity on household saving using cohort, time and sector variation in pension wealth induced...

Using Norwegian administrative data, we study how sizable lottery prizes affect household expenditure and savings. Expenditure responses (MPCs) spike in the year of winning, with a mean estimate of 0.35, and thereafter fall markedly. Controlling for all items on the household balance sheet and...

The seminal paper by Pissarides and Weber (1989) is one of several previous studies trying to measure the size of the black economy. Pissarides and Weber compared the relationship between food expenditure and income in two groups of workers, self-employed and employees in employment, assuming...

We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway's administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, individuals earn markedly different average returns on their net worth (a standard...

Using newly comprehensive data and tools from the Global Consumption and Income Project or CGIP, covering most of the world and five decades, we present a portrait of the changing global distribution of consumption and income and discuss its implications for our understanding of inequality,...

It is shown that if social welfare is the sum of logaritmic utility function, the optimal income distribution and the welfare effect of any income redistribution is independet of the equivalence scales. In optimum all households have the same per capita income. Based on this observation it is...