Reference price regimes for prescription drugs are usually implemented with the aim of curbing public expenditure with pharmaceuticals, induce drug substitution from branded to generics drugs and enhance competition. In these systems, patients co-pay the difference between the drug's pharmacy...

We use the responses of a representative sample of Dutch households to survey questions that ask how much their consumption would change in response to unexpected, permanent, positive or negative shocks to their home value. The average MPC is in the 2.1-4.7% range, in line with econometric...

This paper investigates the effect of price variations on the diet composition in Britain. It describes the dynamics of food demand in relation to food prices over time using data from the British National Food Survey (NFS) covering the period 1975-2000. Demand elasticities with respect to price...

To combat growing levels of obesity, health related taxes have been suggested with taxes on foods high in fat or sugar. Such taxes have been criticised on the basis of their regressivity and potentially adverse impact upon poverty. This paper analyses the effect of such taxes on a range of...

This paper uses transaction-level customer data from the largest bank in Denmark to estimate the change in consumer spending caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shutdown of the Danish economy. We find that aggregate spending was on average 27% below the counterfactual level without...

Objective: To identify how consumption of 12 goods – alcohol, cigarettes, fast food, items sold at vending machines, purchases of food away from home, cookies, cakes, chips, candy, donuts, bacon, and carbonated soft drinks – varies across the income distribution by calculating their...

As households shop less frequently, food decay makes perishable food consumption more costly. Therefore, I hypothesize that shopping frequency is an important factor of household food choice. I test this hypothesis using an instrumental variables approach on a system of equations using household...

This paper examines the evolution of drug use in Colombia over the past years. Our analysis, based on surveys from the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, shows that drug consumption grew substantially between 1996 and 2013. The growth occurred for both genders, all ages, socioeconomic...

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate dynamic food demand in urban China, with use of a complete dynamic demand system - DLES-LA/DAIDS, which pushes forward the techniques of demand analysis. Design/methodology/approach – We employ a transitionary demand process and develop a...