We extend the Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (Review of Economic Studies, 2006) model of external deep-habits with the idea that some product varieties are more prone to habit formation than others. This s uncertainty in habit formation which affects firm's pricing. Provided that uncertainty is...

When each of the members of a collective displays a demand behavior that is consistent with a homogeneous of degree one in income demand, it is well known that some properties carry over to the aggregate representative consumer. We investigate those issues when the components of the society are...

There has been a dramatic increase in market concentration in the retail sector in the United States. Although it is typically assumed that standard supply-side forces of returns to scale are behind this trend, it is also possible that demand-side forces have played a role, i.e., that consumers...

We conduct cusum tests of structural change in a rational addiction model of cigarette demand estimated using a panel of annual time series of state-level data. In contrast to the one previous application of cusum tests to the question of cigarette demand stability, our results provide strong...

This paper investigates the impact of habits on savings and steady state capital intensity. Within the framework of an OLG economy with productive capital, a rise in the strength of habits increases savings if the steady state is asymptotically stable. Consequently, the steady state capital...

This paper lends legitimacy to the food share as an indicator of welfare by demonstrating the conditions necessary in empirical work for the Engel method of estimating equivalence scales to provide an exact measure of welfare. In analogy to a money metric of utility, the Engel's food share is...

We analyze why formal credit, informal credit, and both types of credits coexist as consumer choices. We construct a model in which the households pay a fixed cost to access each type of market and face a market particular interest rate. The model induces a cost curve that defines an optimal,...

This paper presents a model where the ability to enjoy consumption gets impaired by disabilities over time. A continuous-time Markov chain model is constructed to examine how disability risk affects consumers' discounting of future utilities. It is shown that hyperbolic discounting arises for...

This note analyzes the effect of a change in the covariance between labor income risk and interest rate risk on the threshold level for prudence ensuring positive precautionary saving, recently derived by Baiardi, Magnani and Menegatti (2014). We show that this effect is different in different...

The well-known study by Ferraro and Taylor (2005) on the understanding of opportunity cost has sparked considerable debate. This paper addresses one specific aspect of the question, namely the issue of units of measurement when converting goods to dollars for comparison purposes. Results...