We explore intertemporal preferences that are recursive and account for local intertemporal substitution. First, we establish a rigorous foundation for these preferences and analyze their properties. Next, we examine the associated optimal consumption problem, proving the existence and...

Evidence suggests that consumers do not perfectly optimize, contrary to a critical assumption of classical consumer theory. We propose a model in which consumer types can vary in both their preferences and their choice behavior. Given data on demand and the distribution of prices, we identify...

The Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995, BLP) model is widely used to obtain parameter estimates of market forces in differentiated product markets. The results are often used as an input to evaluate economic activity in a structural model of demand and supply. Precise estimation of parameter...

The rationality of choices is one of the most fundamental assumptions of traditional economic analysis. Yet, substantial evidence has documented that choices often cannot be rationalized by utility maximization. Several measures of rationality have been introduced in the literature to quantify...

Manufacturing activities are associated with environmental issues, including industrial waste and dust. Recent comprehensive policies in China have effectively reduced the emissions of some atmospheric pollutants, such as SO2, NOx, CO, PM10, and VOC.However, this does not apply to industrial...

The Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995, BLP) model is widely used to obtain parameter estimates of market forces in differentiated product markets. The results are often used as an input to evaluate economic activity in a structural model of demand and supply. Precise estimation of parameter...

The rationality of choices is one of the most fundamental assumptions of traditional economic analysis. Yet, substantial evidence has documented that choices often cannot be rationalized by utility maximization. Several measures of rationality have been introduced in the literature to quantify...

Why do richer countries spend a higher share of their income on social protection than poor countries A newly assembled dataset on social protection spending for 142 countries since 1995 allows an exploration of alternate hypotheses, treating the pandemic period separately, as it entailed a...

This paper explores optimal consumption and portfolio decisions in the presence of risky house prices. We assume that changes in real interest rates and future rents directly impact house prices. A novel aspect of our model is that rent inflation rates and consumption inflation rates are...

Some economists argue antitrust policy should be based on empirical methods used by the Industrial Organization subdiscipline of economics, but non-economists must understand that those methods contain certain highly restrictive assumptions. Those assumptions involve econometric...

There is a growing momentum to base the poverty line on total consumption expenditure as it is a better measure of welfare. This chapter explores three related approaches to measuring household welfare that together represent an alternative ‘inductive’ measuring approach. We focus on...

We develop a new dynamic continuous-time model of optimal consumption and investment to include independent stochastic labor income. We reduce the problem of solving the Bellman equation to a problem of solving an integral equation. We then explicitly characterize the optimal consumption and...

This paper examines the extent to which gains-from-trade predictions from commonly-used trade theories are consistent with observed household consumption decisions. Our approach is based on inference from household-level estimation of food Engel curves in the US and in a few other countries. For...

This paper examines the extent to which gains-from-trade predictions from commonly-used trade theories are consistent with observed household consumption decisions. Our approach is based on inference from household-level estimation of food Engel curves in the US and in a few other countries. For...

Investment disparity in the education of persons with disabilities may be larger on the part of parents, in part resulting from predicted lower returns to the investment due to mistaken beliefs about their capabilities, or actual lower returns due to barriers in the labor market. Using a...

Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? We answer this question by providing bounds on welfare that hold for families of demand curves commonly considered in different...

In old age, consumption can fluctuate because of shocks to available resources and because health shocks affect utility from consumption. We find that even temporary drops in income and health are associated with drops in consumption and most of the effect of temporary drops in health on...

The classic Working-Leser household Engel curve is unpacked to reveal individual budget allocations across commodities as a function of both individual and household total spending. Two main findings emerge on calibrating our model to an unusual sub-household dataset for Senegal. First, for all...

The Slutsky matrix function encodes all the information about local variations in demand with respect to small (Slutsky) compensated price changes. When the demand function is the result of utility maximization the Slutsky matrix is symmetric. However, symmetry does not imply rationality. Here,...

This paper provides a dual formulation of the optimal consumption problem with internal multiplicative habit formation. In this problem, the agent derives utility from the ratio of consumption to the internal habit component. Due to this multiplicative specification of the habit model, the...

We characterize optimal consumption policies in a recursive intertemporal utility framework with local substitution. We establish existence and uniqueness and a version of the Kuhn-Tucker theorem characterizing the optimal consumption plan. An explicit solution is provided for the case when the...

This paper examines the extent to which gains-from-trade predictions from commonly-used trade theories are consistent with observed household consumption decisions. Our approach is based on inference from household-level estimation of food Engel curves in the US and in a few other countries. For...

Consumers often face choice settings in which alternatives are discrete. Examples include choices between variants of differentiated products, modes of urban transportation, residential locations, etc. In this paper compensated price elasticities and a corresponding(aggregate) Slutsky equation...

We propose a tractable dynamic framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio choice, and healthcare irreversible investment. Our model is based on a Merton's portfolio and consumption problem, where, in addition, the agent can choose the time at which undertaking a...

The Japanese Consumer Price Index (CPI) is considered to be upwardly biased.This paper estimated the Engel curve based on National Survey of Family Incomeand Expenditure data to measure the bias. The estimated bias for the period 1989to 2004 was 0.53 percentage points per annum. Correcting the...

In this study, we investigate an optimal consumption and investment problem of an economic agent who faces a welfare constraint; the agent does not accept her expected utility (continuation value) falls below a certain fixed level regardless of the time and state. This optimization problem...

"Since the Reform and Opening up, China's economy has maintained a high annual growth rate of 9.72%, which is called 'China's miracle'. At the same time, the stability of economic growth has been gradually improved. According to Lin Jianhao and Wang Jinmei (2013), China's economy has entered a...

We introduce an instrumental variables approach to estimate the importance of unmeasured quality growth for a set of 66 durable consumer goods. Our instrument is based on predicting which of these 66 goods will display rapid quality growth. Using pooled cross- relatively sections of households...

I develop a technique useful for obtaining more precise estimates of demand and supply curves when constrained to market-level data. It augments the estimation routine with data on the average characteristics of consumers that purchase different products. I apply the technique to the automobile...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to stark reductions in economic activity in India. We employ CMIE's Consumer Pyramids Household Survey to examine the timing, distribution, and mechanism of the impacts from this shock on income and consumption through December 2020. First, we estimate large and...

This paper studies the infinite horizon optimal consumption with a path-dependent reference under the exponential utility. The performance is measured by the difference between the non-negative consumption rate and a fraction of the historical consumption maximum. The consumption running maximum...

We propose a new optimal consumption model in which the degree of addictiveness of habit formation is directly controlled through a constraint on admissible consumption. In particular, we assume that the individual is unwilling to consume at a rate below a certain proportion 0α≤1 of her...

Despite the intensive efforts made by economists to examine regional income inequality in China, limited attention has been paid to disentangle the contribution of regional price differentials. This paper examines regional price differential in urban China over the period 1986 to 2001. Spatial...

Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates—often for convenience, tractability, or both. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? In this paper, we answer this question by providing bounds on welfare that hold for...