How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare...

In this paper we develop a measure of current expenditures on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective...

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-based nonparametric approach to characteristics models. We derive the...

Over much of the past 25 years, the cycles of house price and consumption growth have been closely synchronised. Three main hypotheses for this co-movement have been proposed in the literature. First, that an increase in house prices raises households' wealth, particularly for those in a...

In this paper we model the changing distribution of household spending in the UK over the period 1978 to 1999 and explore the interpretation of remaining time trends in spending once changes in other observed covariates have been accounted for.

This paper presents a nonparametric method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual or reservation price of a new good. This allows the welfare effects of product market innovations to be investigated. We illustrate the technique using consumer panel data.

Does money matter? When investigating health behaviour, research often finds a strong positive association between income and healthy behaviour. This could however be due to individual characteristics that determine both income and health investment and is not necessarily due to the role of...

Household composition can be expected to affect the allocation of household expenditure among goods, at the very least because of economies of scale as household size increases and because different people have different needs (adults versus children, for example). Specifying demographic effects...

This paper uses revealed preference restrictions and nonparametric statistical methods to bound a quality-constant price series for a good that changes quality over time. Unlike the more usual hedonic regression techniques for estimating quality-adjusted prices, this method does not require us...