By buying cheap and selling dear, risk-neutral commodity speculators can smooth commodity prices and induce serial dependence in price even when none would exist under a simple process of supply and demand. Commodity prices are variable and strongly positively correlated from one year to the...

The authors investigate nutrition and expenditure in rural Maharashtra in India. They estimate that the elasticity of calorie consumption with respect to total expenditure is 0.3-0.5, a range that is in accord with conventional wisdom. The elasticity declines only slowly with levels of living...

The permanent income hypothesis implies that, for any cohort of people, inequality in consumption and income should grow with age, a prediction that is here confirmed using data from eleven years of household survey data from the United States, twenty-two years from Great Britain, and fourteen...