This paper derives nonparametric conditions for the existence of reference-dependent preferences that rationalize a price-taking consumer’s demand behavior. Unless reference points are modelable and sensitivity is constant, reference-dependent models of consumer demand are flexible enough to fit virtually any data. Assuming modelable reference points and constant sensitivity, we characterize continuous reference-dependent preferences, relaxing Kőszegi and Rabin’s (2006; “KR”) strong functional-structure assumptions. We use our characterization to re-analyze Farber’s (2005, 2008) data on cabdrivers’ labor supply. Relaxing KR’s assumptions greatly increases a nonparametric measure of predictive success. For many drivers, a relaxed reference-dependent model has greater success than its neoclassical counterpart.

This article provides a revealed preference characterisation of quasi-hyperbolic discounting which is designed to be applied to readily available expenditure surveys. We describe necessary and sufficient conditions for the leading forms of the model and also study the consequences of the restrictions on preferences popularly used in empirical lifecycle consumption models. Using data from a household consumption panel dataset, we explore the prevalence of time-inconsistent behaviour. The quasi-hyperbolic model provides a significantly more successful account of behaviour than the alternatives considered. We estimate the joint distribution of time preferences and the distribution of discount functions at various time horizons.

We derive necessary and sufficient nonparametric conditions for several models of mental accounting. The paper characterises pure mental accounting, separable accounts, and labelled income, and compares these boundedly rational models with two rational multi-stage budgeting benchmarks. The resulting Afriat-style conditions make the observable implications of mental accounting explicit and refutable. In this sense, mental accounting is treated not as a loose description of behaviour, but as a formally refutable hypothesis about the organisation of consumption.

This paper provides a revealed preference characterisation of quasi-hyperbolic discounting which is designed to be applied to readily-available expenditure surveys. We describe necessary and sufficient conditions for the leading forms of the model and also study the consequences of the restrictions on preferences popularly used in empirical lifecycle consumption models. Using data from a household consumption panel dataset we explore the prevalence of time-inconsistent behaviour. The quasi-hyperbolic model provides a significantly more successful account of behaviour than the alternatives considered. We estimate the joint distribution of time preferences and the distribution of discount functions at various time horizons.

We develop an approach to valuing non-market goods using nonparametric revealed preference analysis. We show how nonparametric methods can also be used to bound the welfare effects of changes in the provision of a non-market good. Our main context is one in which the non-market good affects the marginal utility of consuming a related market good. This can also be framed as a shift in the taste for, or quality of, the market good. A systematic approach for incorporating quality/taste variation into a revealed preference framework for heterogeneous consumers is developed. This enables the recovery of the minimal variation in quality required to rationalise observed choices of related market goods. The variation in quality appears as a adjustment to the price for related market goods which then allows a revealed preference approach to bounding compensation measures of welfare effects to be applied.

Using data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) from 1998 to 2010, we estimate a demand system for non durable goods, under different assumptions regarding the behavior of households. Thanks to the unique features of the CE, which records labor supply and information on durables together with income and demand, we are able to look at how assumptions of full intertemporal separability and separability of durables from non durables impact the demand estimation. We test, and reject, the separability assumptions and show how relaxing them affects the magnitude of the estimated income and price elasticities. This exercise illustrates the importance of building on the strengths of the CE as a comprehensive source of quantified information on household behavior if it is to fulfill its goal of providing government and policy makers with information on the impact of policy on household behavior and welfare.

Using data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) from 1998 to 2010, we estimate a demand system for non durable goods, under dierent assumptions regarding the behaviour of households. Thanks to the unique features of the CE, which records labour supply and information on durables together with income and demand, we are able to look at how assumptions of full intertemporal separability and separability of durables from non durables impact the demand estimation. We test, and reject, the separability assumptions and show how relaxing them aects the magnitude of the estimated income and price elasticities. This exercise illustrates the importance of building on the strengths of the CE as a comprehensive source of quanti…ed information on household behaviour if it is to ful…ll its goal of providing government and policy makers with information on the impact of policy on household behaviour and welfare.

Do households cut back on food spending to finance the additional cost of keeping warm during spells of unseasonably cold weather? For households which cannot smooth consumption over time, we describe how cold weather shocks are equivalent to income shocks. We merge detailed household level expenditure data from older households with historical regional weather information. We find evidence that the poorest of older households cannot smooth fuel spending over the worst temperature shocks. Statistically significant reductions in food spending occur in response to winter temperatures 2 or more standard deviations colder than expected, which occur about 1 winter month in 40; reductions in food expenditure are considerably larger in poorer households.

We investigate necessary and sufficient nonparametric conditions for the quasi-hyperbolic consumer. These turn out to be quite tractable. We investigate the performance of this model compared to the standard exponential discounting model using consumer panel data.

Government transfers to individuals are often given labels indicating that they are designed to support the consumption of particular goods. Standard economic theory implies that the labeling of cash transfers or cash-equivalents should have no effect on spending patterns. We study the UK Winter Fuel Payment, a cash transfer to older households. Our empirical strategy nests a regression discontinuity design within an Engel curve framework. We find robust evidence of a behavioral effect of labeling. On average households spend 47% of the WFP on fuel. If the payment were treated as cash, we would expect households to spend 3% of the payment on fuel.

Governments, over much of the developed world, make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children. For example, in the United States the recently introduced Child Tax Credit (CTC), which goes to almost all children, costs almost $1 billion each week, or about 0.4% of GNP. The United Kingdom has even more generous transfers and spends an average of about $30 a week on each of about 8 million children—about 1% of GNP. The typical rationale given for these transfers is that they are good for our children and here we investigate the effect of such transfers on household spending patterns. In the United Kingdom such transfers, known as Child Benefit (CB), have been simple lump sum universal payments for a continuous period of more than 20 years. We do indeed find that CB is spent differently from other income—paradoxically, it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult-assignable goods. In fact, we estimate that as much as half of a marginal dollar of CB is spent on alcohol. We resolve this puzzle by showing that the effect is confined to unanticipated variation in CB so we infer that parents are sufficiently altruistic toward their children that they completely insure them against shocks.

Over much of the past 25 years, house price and consumption growth have been closely synchronized. Three main hypotheses for this have been proposed: increases in house prices raise household wealth and so their consumption; house price growth reduces credit constraints by increasing the collateral available to homeowners; and house prices and consumption are together influenced by common factors. Using microeconomic data, we find that the relationship between house prices and consumption is stronger for younger than older households, contradicting the wealth channel. We suggest that common causality has been the most important factor linking house prices and consumption.

How do house price changes affect the cost of living? The retail price index in the UK does not directly incorporate house price changes. Instead it uses mortgage interest to capture the cost of owning a home. This is a useful method from many perspectives. However, from a consumer welfare perspective, while mortgage interest does capture the cost of a particular service, it does not capture the cost of housing services. The shadow price of housing captures the welfare cost to a household of changes in housing prices. In this paper we create a new shadow price index using RPI data and the shadow price of housing and investigate how replacing the mortgage interest with the shadow price of housing affects measures of the cost of living.

We investigate whether households trade off spending on food and spending on heating. We use a large sample of households from the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland over the period 1974-2007. We find evidence that low-income households reduce food expenditure during periods of colder than average weather. In contrast, wealthier households increase spending on food during colder than average weather. Further we investigate the efficacy of the Winter Fuel Payment, a social program designed to mitigate the effects of energy costs.

We investigate whether households trade off spending on food and spending on heating. We use a large sample of households from the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland over the period 1974-2007. We find evidence that low-income households reduce food expenditure during periods of colder than average weather. In contrast, wealthier households increase spending on food during colder than average weather. Further we investigate the efficacy of the Winter Fuel Payment, a social program designed to mitigate the effects of energy costs.

In this paper we develop a measure of current on housing services for owner-occupiers. Having such a measure is important for measuring the relative welfare of households, especially when comparing renters and owners and for measuring inflation. From a theoretical perspective expenditures equal the of housing services (the marginal rate of substitution between housing services and non-durable consumption) multiplied by the quantity of housing services consumed. In an idealised world, two simple measures of the shadow price are available; the user cost of housing capital and the rental price of an equivalent rental house. However, imperfect capital markets, risk aversion, the tax system, moving costs and systematic differences between houses available in the rental and owner-occupied sectors drive a wedge between the shadow price of housing and these other two measures. This paper contributes to previous research by calibrating a lifecycle model of housing investment and consumption to data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey and by developing measures of the shadow price of housing that take into account uncertainty in house prices, interest rates and incomes, dynamic life cycle choices, and liquidity constraints that depend on both income and house value.

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derive the necessary and sufficient empirical conditions under which data on the market behaviour of heterogeneous, price-taking consumers are nonparametrically consistent with the consumer characteristics model. Where these conditions hold, we show how information may be recovered on individual consumer's marginal valuations of product attributes. In some cases marginal valuations are point identified and in other cases we can only recover bounds. Where the conditions fail we highlight the role which the introduction of unobserved product attributes can play in rationalising the data. We implement these ideas using consumer panel data on the Danish milk market.