Using longitudinal data from PSID, we show the positive relation between labor income and the equity share of financial wealth is stronger for those who have a higher persistence in shocks to permanent labor income. The results support the hypothesis that the cross sectional variation in...

It is shown how one can effectively use cross-section data in modelling the change over time in aggregate consumption expenditure of a heterogeneous population. The starting point of our aggregation analysis is a dynamic behavioral relation on the household level. Based on certain hypotheses on...

We propose a novel structural method to empirically identify economies of scale in household consumption. We assume collective households with consumption technologies that define the public and private nature of expenditures through Barten scales. Our method recovers the technology by solely...

The literature on household behavior contains hardly any empirical research on the withinhousehold distributional effect of tax-benefit policies. We simulate this effect in the framework of a collective model of labor supply when shifting from a joint to an individual taxation system in France....

Do the choices of consumers who search for a product's best price exhibit risk neutral, risk averse or loss averse risk attitudes? We study how in a problem of sequential search with costless recall the relation between a consumer's willingness to pay for continued search and the level of price...

Many budget surveys present the interesting features that for a wide range of goods they contain quantity information along with expenditure information, and that the geographical location of households is fairly precise. We take advantage of these features to develop a method for estimation of...

Varian (1988) showed that the utility maximization hypothesis cannot be falsified when only a subset of goods is observed. We show that this result does not hold under the assumptions that unobserved prices and expenditures remain constant. These assumptions are naturally satisfied in laboratory...

The implementation of Gary Becker's (1965) time allocation model is hampered by the fact that values of the different time uses are usually not observed. In practice, one often assumes that the value of time is uniform across time uses by using market wages. This approach implies a fundamental...

The positive correlation between hourly wages and height, which results in higher labor supply of tall individuals, is well-documented in the literature. Accepting the utilitarian perspective and assuming that height does not affect utility implies that linking income taxes to height is welfare...

Revealed preference restrictions are increasingly used to bound demand responses and as shape restrictions in nonparametric estimation exercises. However, the restrictions imposed are not sufficient for rationality when predictions are made at more than a single price regime. We highlight the...