Sets consisting of finite collections of prices and endowments such that total resources are constant, or collinear, or approximately collinear, can always be viewed as subsets of some equilibrium manifold. The additional requirement that such collections of price-endowment data are compatible...

The neo-classical theory of demand applies to individuals yet in empirical work it is usually taken as valid for households with many members. This paper explores what the theory of individuals implies for households with many members. This paper explores what the theory of individuals implies...

The present study examines whether the Preston curve reflects a causal impact of income on longevity or, for example, factors correlated with both income and life expectancy. In order to understand the Preston curve better, we develop a model of optimal intertemporal consumption in which the...

I show that conventional estimators based on the consumption Euler equation, intensively used in studies of intertemporal consumption behavior, produce biased estimates of the effect of children on consumption if potentially binding credit constraints are ignored. As a more constructive...

In this survey, we review the recent theoretical and empirical literature on household saving and consumption. The discussion is structured around a list of motives for saving and how well the standard theory captures these motives. We show that almost all of the motives for saving that have...

Loss aversion is one of the most robust findings to have emerged from behavioral economics. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been devoted to nominal loss aversion, the interaction of loss aversion and money illusion. People tend to think of transactions in terms of their nominal...

There is widespread evidence that monetary policy exerts asymmetric effects on output over contractions and expansions in economic activity, while price responses display no sizeable asymmetry. To rationalize these facts we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where households' utility...

We present some simple utility functions whose Marshallian demand functions possess the Giffen property: at some price-wealth pairs, the demand for a good marginally increases in response to an increase in its own price. The utility functions satisfy standard preference properties throughout the...

We consider a pure exchange economy with private ownership in which consumers have interdependent preferences. Hence, consumers’ preferences are defined on the states of the economy. In a Walras equilibrium for such an economy, it may, of course, be possible for two or more consumers to...

This paper provides an introduction to and discussion of the application of lattice-theoretic methods to classic problems in consumer theory. General characterizations of income effects with two goods, and with an arbitrary number of goods, as well as examples of comparative statics over...