Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the possibility of some measure of devolution to regional governments for at least parts of the United Kingdom. In Scotland, the debate has been particularly advanced, and three of the four main political parties in Scotland are...

This paper presents an hedonic model of the price of a sample of new cars available in the UK during the period 1986 to 1995. It overcomes the problem of collinearity in the characteristics data by grouping them on a priori grounds and then using principal components analysis to generate group...

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound true cost-of-living indices. These are compared to the popular price indices including the type used to calculated the UK RPI. This is used to assess the method of calculating the RPI for substitution...

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound the true cost-of-living index which corresponds most closely to the UK Retail Prices Index (RPI). This is used to assess the RPI formula for substitution bias. We show that neither the direction nor...

Government transfers to individuals are often given labels indicating that they are designed to support the consumption of particular goods. Standard economic theory implies that the labeling of cash transfers or cash-equivalents should have no effect on spending patterns. We study the UK Winter...

type="main" xml:id="rssa12013-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Do households cut back on food spending to finance the additional cost of keeping warm during spells of unseasonably cold weather? For households which cannot smooth consumption over time, we describe how cold weather shocks are equivalent to...</p>

We merge detailed household level expenditure data from older households with historical local weather information. We then test for a heat or eat trade off: do households cut back on food spending to finance the additional cost of keeping warm during cold shocks? For households who cannot...

Does money matter? When investigating health behaviour, research often finds a strong positive association between income and healthy behaviour. This could however be due to individual characteristics that determine both income and health investment and is not necessarily due to the role of...

Over much of the past 25 years, the cycles of house price and consumption growth have been closely synchronised. Three main hypotheses for this co-movement have been proposed in the literature. First, that an increase in house prices raises households' wealth, particularly for those in a...

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference-based nonparametric approach to characteristics models. We derive the...