Shocks to world commodity prices and the depreciation of sterling led to a large increase in the price of food in the UK. It also resulted in large changes in the relative prices of different foods. The authors document these changes, and consider how they affected the composition of households’ shopping baskets.
Over the Great Recession UK households reduced real food expenditure. The authors show that they were able to maintain the number of calories that they purchased, and the nutritional quality of these calories, by adjusting their shopping behaviour.
We construct a tractable structural dynamic model of consumption, purchase and stocks by consumers for whom stockpiling is unobserved and for whom preferences are isolastic and affected by independent and identically distributed shocks.
Random utility models are widely used to study consumer choice. The vast majority of applications make strong assumptions about the marginal utility of income, which restricts income effects, demand curvature and pass-through. The authors show that flexibly modeling income effects can be important, particularly if one is interested in the distributional effects of a policy change, even in a market in which, a priori, the expectation is that income effects will play a limited role. The authors allow for much more flexible forms of income effects than is common and illustrate the implications by simulating the introduction of an excise tax.
This paper describes all the main benefits in the UK system, giving details of rates and allowances, as well as numbers and types of claimants and levels of expenditure.
This document provides an overview of the UK tax system, describing how each of the main taxes works and setting their current state in a historical context.
