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...

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...

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...

Consumers often face choice settings in which alternatives are discrete. Examples include choices between variants of differentiated products, modes of urban transportation, residential locations, etc. In this paper compensated price elasticities and a corresponding(aggregate) Slutsky equation...