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...

We present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of- living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer...

Household expenditure data is an important input into the study of consumption and savings behaviour and of living standards and inequality. Because it is collected in many surveys, food expenditure data has formed the basis of much work in these areas. Recently, there has been considerable...

This paper is an attempt to answer the long standing question of whether households with higher lifetime income save a larger fraction of their income. The major difficulty in empirically assessing the relationship between lifetime incomes and saving rates is to construct a credible proxy for...

This paper shows that a power utility specification of preferences over total expenditure (ie. CRRA preferences) implies that intratemporal demands are in the PIGL/PIGLOG class. This class generates (at most) rank two demand systems and we can test the validity of power utility on cross-section...

We use direct evidence on credit constraints to study their importance for household consumption growth and for welfare. We distentangle the direct effect on consumption growth of a currently binding credit constraints from the indirect effect of a potentially binding credit constraint which...