We show that (Marshallian) income elasticities are proportional to (Frisch) own price elasticities if all goods are additively separable. This implies that luxuries are likely to be easier to postpone. It also implies that preferences over "consumption" are unlikely to display a constant...

There is evidence that one cannot treat many-person households as a single decisionmaker. If so, then factors such as the relative incomes of the household members may affect the final allocation decisions made by the household. The authors develop a method of identifying how incomes affect...

Intertemporal separability is an almost universal assumption in empirical work on household behavior, but a good deal of recent work on consumption and labor supply suggest that it may not be tenable. The traditional weakening of this assumption is to allow for habit formation. The authors...

We estimate and test the restrictions of a collective model of household consumption, using z-conditional demands, in the context of a large conditional cash transfer program in rural Mexico. The model can explain the impacts of the program on the structure of food consumption. We use two...

We investigate the possibility that limited participation in asset markets, and the stock market in particular, might explain the lack of correspondence between the sample moments of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution and asset returns in U.K. data. We estimate ownership...

We use microeconomic data on households to estimate the parameters of the demand for currency derived from a generalized Baumol-Tobin model. Our data set contains information on average currency, deposits, and other interest-bearing assets; the number of trips to the bank; the size of...

The authors analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare. Their empirical work draws on the best available cross-sectional data sets to construct synthetic panel data on U.S. consumption,...