For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of every individual's expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test...

In this paper, I estimate the poverty rate as the proportion of individuals who have consumption - rather than income - lower than an absolute poverty line. The absolute poverty line used is based on the expenditure necessary to achieve a minimum level of material well-being. It does not change...

We use quantile regression methods on 2001 Census of Canada data to assess disparity at four points in the conditional distribution of earnings of native-born ethnic minorities (the 20th, 50th, 80th and 90th percentiles) as well as at the mean. In doing so, we examine and assess the degree to...

We assess the evolution of consumption inequality in Canada over the years 1997 to 2009. We correct the imputation of shelter consumption for owner-occupiers to allow for unobserved differences in housing quality correlated with selection into rental tenure, and we account for measurement error...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify because consumption is measured at the household level and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided up...

We present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of-living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer...