We study an intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem under Knightian uncertainty in which agent's preferences exhibit local intertemporal substitution. We also allow for market frictions in the sense that the pricing functional is nonlinear. We prove existence and uniqueness of the...

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...

Food insecurity and malnutrition are still major challenges for large proportions of households in Sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical literature on food demand, however, suggests mixed evidence on the roles of income and other socio-economic attributes on food demand. This study analyzes the food...

In the study of Giffen behavior or "Giffenity", there remains a paradox. On the one hand, the Wold-Juréen (1953) utility function has been touted as the progenitor of a multi-decade search for those two-good, particular utility functions, which exhibit Giffenity. On the other hand, there is no...

Frequent measurement of poverty is challenging, as measurement often relies on complex and expensive expenditure surveys that try to measure expenditures on a comprehensive consumption aggregate. This paper investigates the use of consumption "sub-aggregates" instead. The use of consumption...

It is frequently assumed in several domains of economics that demand functions are invertible in prices. At the primitive level of preferences, however, the characterization of such demand functions remains elusive. We identify conditions on a utility-maximizing consumer's preferences that are...