Equivalence scales are routinely applied to adjust the income of households of different sizes and compositions. Because of their practical importance for the measurement of inequality and poverty, a large number of methods for the estimation of equivalence scales have been proposed. Until now,...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...

The present paper analyses the expenditure behavior of Albanian families. The objective is to cast some light upon the relationship between education expenditure and the volume of remittances, sent from abroad by household members. To assess the existence of an education enhancing effect of...

We examine the effect of large cash transfers on the consumption of food by poor households in rural Mexico. The transfers represent 20% of household income on average, and yet, the budget share of food is unchanged following receipt of this money. This is an important puzzle to solve,...

All micro studies of demand are based on using time series cross sectional data. Because in such data each household is only observed once, it is only under strong identifying restrictions that one can interpret the coefficients on consumer behavior. For example, if tastes are correlated with...

This paper presents a formal model in which differential satiation dynamics of various consumer needs translate into long-run changes of consumer behavior when income rises. In the model individuals allocate their income to the consumption categories proportional to need deprivation states...

By representing a system of budget shares as an approximate factor model we determine its rank, i.e. the number of common functional forms, or factors and we estimate a base of the factor space by means of approximate principal components. We assume that the extracted factors span the same space...

As people become richer they get the opportunity of consuming more but also qualitatively better goods. This holds for a basic commodity like food as well. We investigate food consumption in Russia, taking into account both expenditure and nutrition value in terms of calories. We analyze how...

This paper documents the integration of microsimulation tools for direct taxation, indirect taxation, and social benefits in the context of the European tax and benefit simulator, EUROMOD. Integration has been developed parallely for the two countries, Belgium and Germany. The paper at hand...

This paper documents the integration of microsimulation tools for direct taxation, indirect taxation, and social benefits in the context of the European tax and benefit simulator, EUROMOD. Integration has been developed in parallel for two countries: Belgium and Germany. The paper at hand...