We examine the value of sporting success to the German population at two major sport events in 2012, the European Championships in football and the London Olympic Games. Using the contingent valuation method (CVM), this study is the first to compare the value of sporting success between two...

Consumer satisfaction is a key determinant of customer retention, profitability of operators, consumer welfare and a strategic variable for competition and international comparisons. Spain's mobile customer satisfaction is the lowest in the European Union according to recent EU studies (SMREC,...

Many developing countries have adopted the market approach for expanding the supply of child care, but little is known about the economic behavior of independent providers. This paper draws on uniquely rich administrative data on child care centers and their inputs from São Paulo to examine the...

This paper exploits unique features of a recently introduced tariff schedule for natural gas in Buenos Aires to estimate the short-run impact of price shocks on residential energy utilization. The schedule induces a non-linear and nonmonotonic relationship between households' accumulated...

This paper assesses the effects of the Colombian Unemployment Subsidy (US), which includes benefits as well as training for some recipients. Using regression discontinuity and matching differences-in-differences estimators, the study finds that participation in the labor market, earnings of...

This paper examines whether an expansion in the supply of public preschool crowds out private enrollment, using rich data for municipalities in Brazil from 2000-2006, where federal transfers to local governments change discontinuously with given population thresholds. Results from a...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) - defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities - for a large sample of Italian households in the period...

In this paper we explore the statistical properties of the distributions of consumption expenditures for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. Goodness-of-fit tests show that household aggregate (and age-conditioned) consumption distributions are not log-normal. Rather,...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...