Panel and Pseudo-Panel Estimation of Cross-Sectional and Time Series Elasticities of Food Consumption: The Case of American and Polish Data

The problem addressed in this article is the bias to income and expenditure elasticities estimated on pseudo-panel data caused by measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We gauge empirically these biases by comparing cross-sectional, pseudo-panel and true panel data from both Polish and American expenditure surveys. Our results suggest that unobserved heterogeneity imparts a downward bias to cross-section estimates of income elasticities of at-home food expenditures and an upward bias to estimates of income elasticities of away-from-home food expenditures. "Within" and first-difference estimators suffer less bias, but only if the effects of measurement error are accounted for with instrumental variables.