I use micro data on food and recreation expenditures from 1888 to 1994 to provide the first estimates of overall CPI bias prior to the 1970s and new estimates of bias since the 1970s and to reassess long-run growth rates. I find that CPI bias was -0.1 percentage points per year between 1888 and...

I use consumer expenditure surveys from 1888-1890, 1917-1919, 1935-1936, 1972-1973, and 1991 to determine whether trends in real income per capita are consistent with trends in recreational budget shares and to establish trends in inequality in recreational expenditures. I find that changes in...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families--the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...

Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city--defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide estimates of the standard of living by commuting zone for...

In the U.S., analyses of poverty rates and the effects of anti-poverty programs rely almost exclusively on income data. In earlier work (Meyer and Sullivan, 2003) we emphasized that conceptual arguments generally favor using consumption data to measure the well-being of the poor, and, on...

This paper considers a consumption-based asset pricing model where housing is explicitly modeled both as an asset and as a consumption good. Nonseparable preferences describe households' concern with composition risk, that is, fluctuations in the relative share of housing in their consumption...