Recently the data underlying the Annual Census of Production has been made available to academic economist in the UK. The data provides information on production activity in the UK at the plant level. This paper provides some preliminary description of the data and discuses a few of its...

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable consumers who are disengaged and thus exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares. This setting encompasses many markets in which established rms are...

We assess the usefulness of stochastic redistribution among a continuum of risk-averse agents with quasilinear utilities in labor. Agents differ according to their consumption tastes, which remain private information. We identify circumstances where stochastic redistribution is socially...

Significant departures from log normality are observed in income data, in violation of Gibrat’s law. We identify a new empirical regularity, which is that the distribution of consumption expenditures across households is, within cohorts, closer to log normal than the distribution of income. We...

We estimate a collective household model with survey data on financial satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel. Our estimates suggest that cohabitating individuals enjoy returns to scale in consumption that are towards the larger end of the range of estimates reported in the...

In this paper we model the changing distribution of household spending in the UK over the period 1978 to 1999 and explore the interpretation of remaining time trends in spending once changes in other observed covariates have been accounted for.

We show that as household size increases, households substitute away from prepared foods and towards ingredients. They also devote more time to food preparation. These observations (1) are consistent with a simple model with home production, returns to scale in the time input to food...

Recent theoretical contributions have suggested consumption externalities, or peergroup effects, as a potential explanation for some of the puzzles in macroeconomics and finance. However, the empirical relevance of peer effects for intertemporal consumption choice is a completely open question....

We develop a method for estimation of price reactions using unit value data which exploits the implicit links between quantity and unit value choices. This allows us to combine appealing Engel curve specifications with a model of unit value determination in a way which is consistent with demand...

Household composition can be expected to affect the allocation of household expenditure among goods, at the very least because of economies of scale as household size increases and because different people have different needs (adults versus children, for example). Specifying demographic effects...