Understanding the determinants of home-efficiency improvements is significant to a range of energy policy issues, including the reduction of fossil fuel use and environmental protection. This paper analyzes retrofit choices by assembling a unique data set merging a nationwide household survey...

This paper examines the impact of three conditional cash transfer programs, PRAF, PROGRESA, and RPS on food consumption. Our nonparametric analysis suggests that the effect on these programs is likely to be highest for the poorest households and this is indeed true in all three countries, even...

This paper focuses on two main issues. First, we find that, on average, households' discount rates decline. This implies dynamically inconsistent preferences. Second, we calculate an indicator of the degree of dynamic inconsistency that may help us to understand how households overcome their...

Programs designed to improve child nutrition are widespread. The ability of such programs to improve the nutrition of individual children depends on how households choose to allocate resources among their members; interventions that target specific individuals in a household may be neutralized...

This paper proposes an approximation to the consumption function in the buffer-stock model. The approximation is based on the analytic properties of the consumption function in the buffer-stock model. In such model, the consumption function is increasing and concave and its derivative is bounded...

We propose a novel approach to estimate household income uncertainty at various future horizons, and characterize how the estimated uncertainty evolves over the life cycle. We measure income uncertainty as the variance of linear forecast errors conditional on information available to households...

The recent explosion in personal bankruptcy filings has motivated research into whether credit markets are being adversely affected by generous legal provisions. Empirically, this question is examined by comparing credit conditions and bankruptcy exemptions across states. We note that the...

In this paper, we use time-use surveys to examine trends in the allocation of time in five industrialized countries over the last thirty years. Adjusting for changing demographics, we find that leisure time across countries has converged over this period. Specifically, leisure time has declined...

This paper presents our findings on the structural relationship between household income and consumption expenditure in the township of Kohima. It is based on the primary data collected from 209 households inhabiting 19 wards of the township. It is found that about 56 percent of households are...

Market prices are well known to efficiently collect and aggregate diverse information regarding the economic value of goods, services, and firms, particularly when trading financial securities. We propose a novel application of the price discovery mechanism in the context of marketing research:...