Facts and figures about UK taxes, benefits and public spending.
Analysing government fiscal forecasts and tax and spending.
Find out where you are in the income distribution.
ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy.
Reforming the tax system for the 21st century.
A peer-reviewed quarterly journal publishing articles by academics and practitioners.
Resources for schools and students.
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All micro studies of demand are based on using time series cross sectional data. Because in such data each household is only observed once, it is only under strong identifying restrictions that one can interpret the coefficients on consumer behavior. For example, if tastes are correlated with income, the usual estimates of income elasticities from cross sectional data are biased. In contrast, panel data allows identification of the coefficients on consumer behavior in the presence of unobservable correlated heterogeneity. In this paper we make use of a unique Spanish panel data set on household expenditures to test whether unobservable heterogeneity in household demands (taste) is correlated with total expenditures (income). We find that tastes are indeed correlated with income for half of the goods considered. Search |
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