In this paper we introduce price search decision to a life cycle model, and differentiate consumption from expenditure. The consumers with low wealth and bad income shocks search more and pay less which makes their consumption higher than a model without search option. A plausibly calibrated...

In this paper, we differentiate consumption from expenditure by incorporating price search decision into an otherwise standard life-cycle model. In our model, households can pay lower prices for the same consumption good if they allocate more time for price search. We first analytically show...

This paper studies the nature, evolution, and sources of inflation heterogeneity across households in France and Germany. Inflation differences are large and persistent. The two main sources of inflation heterogeneity are spatial differences in the prices paid for the same product and...

The cross-sectional distribution of consumption is commonly approximated by the lognormal distribution. This note shows that consumption is better described by the double Pareto-lognormal distribution (dPlN), which has a lognormal body with two Pareto tails and arises as the stationary...

This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget share distributions — defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities — for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...