We show that (Marshallian) income elasticities are proportional to (Frisch) own price elasticities if all goods are additively separable. This implies that luxuries are likely to be easier to postpone. It also implies that preferences over "consumption" are unlikely to display a constant...

Canadian household prescription drug expenditures are studied using the Statistics Canada Family Expenditure Survey masterfiles for periods that include the introduction of provincial 'general population' prescription drug programs. Budget shares for non-senior households are examined over time...

Unique longitudinal probabilistic expectations data from the Berea Panel Study, which cover both the college and early post-college periods, are used to examine young adults’ beliefs about their future incomes. We introduce a new measure of the ex post accuracy of beliefs, and two new...

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS), we study the relationship between health and employment among older Canadians. We focus on two issues: (1) the possible endogeneity of self-reported health, particularly "justification bias", and (2) the relative...

I use a unique data set of Canadian displaced workers to measure the effects of firm of employment on wages. This data set has the advantage of consisting of a sample of workers changing jobs for reasons (product demand shifts or technological changes) that are largely orthogonal to their...

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...

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS), we study the relationship between health and employment among older Canadians. We focus on two issues: (1) the possible problems with self-reported health, including endogeneity and measurement error, and (2) the...

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 uses a time-series of cross-sections drawn from three different surveys to explore life-cycle profiles of housing arrangements in Canada. Synthetic cohort (quasi-panel) methods are employed to disentangle age profiles from cohort effects. The results suggest limited "downsizing" in...

In many research areas it is desirable to have information on household total expenditure ("consumption"). We draw evidence from several sources on the usefulness of recall consumption questions. We conclude that valid information can be collected by adding specific recall questions to general...