Consumption of addictive goods is subject to habit formation. Forward-looking individuals must, therefore, be concerned about future prices when making current consumption decisions. We study prices for tobacco products based on a unique data set provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our...

Consumption of addictive goods is subject to habit formation. Forward-looking individuals must, therefore, be concerned about future prices when making current consumption decisions. We study prices for tobacco products based on a unique data set provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our...

In this paper, we consider expectations of the form E[log(y)|x] = a'log(x) as a good starting point for a more general analysis. We show why this naturally leads to the following flexible functional form E[y|x]= f(h(x)), where all functions are estimated by cubic splines. One of the main goals...