We merge detailed household level expenditure data from older households with historical local weather information. We then test for a heat or eat trade off: do houseolds cut back on food spending to finance the additional cost of keeping warm duing cold shocks? We find evidence that the poorest...

Standard economic theory implies that the labelling of cash transfers or cash-equivalents (e.g. child benefits, food stamps) should have no effect on spending patterns. The empirical literature to date does not contradict this proposition. We study the UK Winter Fuel Payment (WFP), a cash...

The Hamilton method for estimating CPI bias is simple, intuitive, and has been widely adopted. We show that the method conflates CPI bias with variation in cost-of-living across income levels. Assuming a single price index across the income distribution is inconsistent with the downward sloping...