How and why has the way in which the average British family spends its money changed over the past 25 years? Those are the key questions examined in this report, using data from the UK FES between 1975 and 1999. It looks not only at broad changes in total spending, but also at how the division...

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...