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...

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...

This paper examines the extent to which gains-from-trade predictions from commonly-used trade theories are consistent with observed household consumption decisions. Our approach is based on inference from household-level estimation of food Engel curves in the US and in a few other countries. For...