Looking at TV news viewership in Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigate whether demand for national and local news depends on national or local events. Exploiting the fact that epidemiological developments display a great deal of variation among the different regions, we find that...

Watching television is the most time-consuming human activity besides work but its role for individual well-being is unclear. Negative consequences portrayed in the literature raise the question whether this popular pastime constitutes an economic good or bad, and hence serves as a prime example...

In the standard neoclassical model consumers use all the available information and the demand for goods depends exclusively on preferences and prices whereas other spurious information do not play any role. In the market for books, we investigate if – in contrast to the standard model – the...

This paper uses detailed diary information from the British Family Expenditure Survey (FES) to investigate the expenditure patterns of school-age children. We estimate a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System, and find that, whilst most commodities are normal goods, sweets and toys are luxury...

Neoclassical economic theory rules out systematic errors in consumption choice. According to the basic view, individuals know what they choose. They are able to predict how much utility an activity or a good produces for them now and in the future and they can maximize their utility. This...

We non-parametrically test a general collective consumption model with public consumption and externalities inside the household. We further propose a novel approach to model special cases of the general collective model. These special cases include alternative restrictions on the 'sharing rule'...

We adopt the collective approach to consumer behavior with egoistic agents, and assume that the household consumption is either private or public. We then show that (i) household demands have to satisfy testable constraints and (ii) some elements of the decision process can be retrieved from...

We propose a new methodology to estimate the share of household income accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children). Following the principle of the Rothbarth approach, the identification of the children's share requires the observation of at least one adult-specific good. However, our...

We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)'s sense. A practical...

We propose a collective labor supply model with household production that generalizes an original model of Blundell, Chiappori and Meghir (2005). In our model, adults' individual preferences do not only depend on own leisure and individual private consumption of market goods. They also depend on...