On the Consumer Behavior in Urban Colombia: The Case of Bogotá

In this paper we are interested in estimating semiparametric Engel curves for different categoriesof goods using data drawn from the 1997 Family Expenditure Survey (ECV1997). Most of the papersabout consumer behavior include food and clothing shares in the analysis. Since people in developingcountries spend a great deal of time going to work, through their use of public transportation, then it is interesting to take this into account in this study. Due to joint determination of expenditure shares and total xpenditure, we adjust for any possible endogeneity,which is a familiar problem in demand analysis.So, not only estimation but also adaptive testing is provided by non-parametric procedures. Our estimations produce quadratic food and transportation Engel curves, which is an interesting result.