This study investigates whether individual choices in the pension domain are vulnerable to the way alternatives are communicated to respondents. The analysis is based on a set of hypothetical questions posed in the DNB Household Survey as well as in the RAND American Life Panel on pension...

Many electricity demand estimates have been obtained based on the assumption that consumers optimize with respect to known marginal prices, but increasing empirical evidence suggests that consumers are more likely to respond to average prices. Under this assumption, this paper develops a new...

We provide consistent, cross-country estimates of price and income elasticity for the residential sector of 11 OECD countries. Using survey data from 2011 on annual consumption of electricity and sample-derived average electricity price, we provide country-specific price elasticity estimates and...

This paper presents a structural equation model of household fleet fuel efficiency and car use. It allows to weigh the contribution of car equipment changes and car use adjustments to the price elasticity of household demand for fuel. This model is implemented using a panel dataset of 322...

The extant literature using household scanner data to estimate consumer choice models has identified two key sources of bias in estimated mean responses to marketing variables. Omitted heterogeneity may bias mean responses towards zero. At the same time, omitted time-varying characteristics of...

In this paper, I analyze the causes of the prolonged slowdown of the Japanese economy in the 1990s and find that the stagnation of investment, especially private fixed investment, was the primary culprit. I then investigate the causes of the stagnation of household consumption during the 1990s...

This study investigates the rationale for issuing complex securities to retail investors. We focus on a large market of investment products targeted exclusively at households: retail structured products in Europe. We develop an economic measure of product complexity in this market via a text...

The literature reiterates the need to employ indicators that reflect the multidimensional nature of food security. In a quest to capture the multidimensional nature of food security, this study uses a novel ideal that harmonizes two food security indicators (food expenditure (FOODexp) and...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

Gaps in welfare attainment between boys and girls in China have attractedinternational attention. In this paper demand analysis is used to try and uncoverthe factors which may be driving the emergence of these gender gaps.Drawing on household expenditure data from a poor (Sichuan) and rich...