This paper focuses on the estimation and testing of equivalence scales in the context of a demand system with nonline ar logarithmic expenditure effects in its budget-share equations. The authors show that such nonlinearity enables one to identify the scal es without demographic separability...

Official estimates of housing benefit take-up rates suggest that up to two million families in the United Kingdom ma y not be receiving the help with their housing costs to which they ar e entitled. The authors' interest in the take-up of means tested bene fits is therefore motivated by two...

We propose a consumer demand system approach to estimating the size of the black economy where alternative hypotheses affecting the empirical results can be tested in a nested framework. This approach allows for the estimation of the under-reporting of household income from various sources,...

This paper shows that the commonly used Stone index approximation can bias the parameter estimates of the almost ideal demand system. The bias mostly affects the price parameters and can be more serious when the budget share equations are estimated with individual household rather than aggregate...