This paper presents a nonparametric method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual or reservation price of a new good. This allows the welfare effects of product market innovations to be investigated. We illustrate the technique using consumer panel data.

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound a quality-constant price series for a good that changes quality over time. Unlike the more usual hedonic regression techniques for estimating quality-adjusted prices, this method does not require us...

Robust and reliable measures of consumer expenditures are essential for analyzing aggregate economic activity and for measuring differences in household circumstances. Many countries, including the United States, are embarking on ambitious projects to redesign surveys of consumer expenditures,...

Governments, over much of the developed world, make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children. For example, in the US the recently introduced Child Tax Credit (CTC), which goes to almost all children, costs almost $1billion each week, or about 0.4% of GNP. The UK has...

Household composition can be expected to affect the allocation of household expenditure among goods, at the very least because of economies of scale as household size increases and because different people have different needs (adults versus children, for example). Specifying demographic effects...

<p>In this paper we develop a measure of current "expenditures" on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective...</p>

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare...

This paper is the UK contribution to the consumption project. In it, we examine changes in the allocation of household expenditure across different goods and services over the past two decades using the UK Family Expenditure Survey (FES). Over time, households have increased the share of their...