Consumption and prices

This book presents the results of the analysis discussed at a conference in July 1996 for users and providers of Family Expenditure Survey Data

As the government nears the end of a consultation process on charity taxation, this commentary considers some of the key issues in the debate. What are the economic arguments for tax relief? Is there any evidence that tax incentives have a big effect on individual donations? What has been the impact of tax incentives in the UK? What are so-called `US-style tax deductions and how might they work in the UK? What other reforms to the current system of tax relief might the government consider?

In this paper we show how estimates of aggregate spending in the UK would be affected by using grossing weights that take account of the known dimensions of non-representativeness of the Family Expenditure Survey.

The life-cycle hypothesis predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component.

This research is concerned with the demand for lottery tickets and uses data for the UK National Lottery that records the behaviour, incomes and characteristics of almost 10,000 individuals.

A common feature of federal systems is that tax bases are joint property.

Smoothed estimates of the complex relationships between age and intakes of energy, fat, calcium and vitamin C are obtained for males and females from British National Food Survey data covering the period 197494.

This paper illustrates recent trends in household consumption and personal savings in the UK and the US and discusses some theoretical models that can be used to interpret them.

This paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting.

In this report we describe the charitable giving behaviour of UK households over the last two decades.

The charitable giving of UK households has changed considerably over the past 20 years. In particular, the proportion of households giving to charity fell by 5 percentage points between 1974 and 1993-94. An increase in the average size of donations meant that total voluntary income.

The Hicks-Leontief composite commodity theorem permits aggregation of sets of goods that have identical price movements into composite groups of goods, each of which can be treated like a single good for demand analysis.

This paper presents a revealed preference method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual price of new goods and suggests a way to improve these bounds by using non-parametric expansion paths. This allows the calculation of cost-of-living and price indices when the number of goods changes between periods.

We analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare.

In this paper the authors show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in U.S. household-level data.

Despite the widespread use of income as a measure of household welfare, there is much to recommend the use of consumption.