Responses to changes in marginal income tax rates can be more complex than a simple adjustment in hours worked. Given this, a more inclusive way to assess the deadweight costs of taxes on labour income is to examine the effect of changes in the marginal tax rate on taxable income rather than on...

Government transfers to individuals are often given labels indicating that they are designed to support the consumption of particular goods. Standard economic theory implies that the labeling of cash transfers or cash-equivalents should have no effect on spending patterns. We study the UK Winter...

type="main" xml:id="rssa12013-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Do households cut back on food spending to finance the additional cost of keeping warm during spells of unseasonably cold weather? For households which cannot smooth consumption over time, we describe how cold weather shocks are equivalent to...</p>

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derive the necessary and sufficient...

We investigate necessary and sufficient nonparametric conditions for the quasi-hyperbolic consumer. These turn out to be quite tractable. We investigate the performance of this model compared to the standard exponential discounting model using consumer panel data.

Robust and reliable measures of consumer expenditures are essential for analyzing aggregate economic activity and for measuring differences in household circumstances. Many countries, including the United States, are embarking on ambitious projects to redesign surveys of consumer expenditures,...