Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? We answer this question by providing bounds on welfare that hold for families of demand curves commonly considered in different...

We examine the role of trade policy uncertainty in shaping the import decisions of firms. If the adoption of a new input requires a sunk cost investment, then the prospect of price increases in that input, e.g. due to trade barriers, reduces the adoption of that input (a substitution effect) and...

In old age, consumption can fluctuate because of shocks to available resources and because health shocks affect utility from consumption. We find that even temporary drops in income and health are associated with drops in consumption and most of the effect of temporary drops in health on...

The classic Working-Leser household Engel curve is unpacked to reveal individual budget allocations across commodities as a function of both individual and household total spending. Two main findings emerge on calibrating our model to an unusual sub-household dataset for Senegal. First, for all...

This paper provides a dual formulation of the optimal consumption problem with internal multiplicative habit formation. In this problem, the agent derives utility from the ratio of consumption to the internal habit component. Due to this multiplicative specification of the habit model, the...

In December 2019, the United States and China reached a Phase One trade agreement, under which China committed to purchase more imports from the United States: $12.5 billion more agricultural imports in 2020 and $19.5 billion more in 2021, as compared to 2017. We show that the most efficient way...

We characterize optimal consumption policies in a recursive intertemporal utility framework with local substitution. We establish existence and uniqueness and a version of the Kuhn-Tucker theorem characterizing the optimal consumption plan. An explicit solution is provided for the case when the...