Proxy reporting about expenditures Although proxy reporting is ubiquitous in surveys – for example in completing household rosters, reporting labor force participation, and detailing the health status of spouses and children – the use of proxy reporting for detailed reporting of expenditures in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey entails challenges that differ from those for other topics and o...

Introduction The issue of self versus proxy reporting is a classic methodological issue facing survey designers: how to maximize the quality of data while minimizing the costs associated with data collection. In the past, response rates have served as an easily produced measure of quality. Allowing one respondent to provide information about him or herself as well as other members of the househ...

Consumption models with endogenous debt constraints differ from standard incomplete markets models in their predictions about an individual household’s ability to smooth consumption across time and states of the world. In this paper we develop these differences, both theoretically and quantitatively. We then use data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) to assess along which dimensions ...

Microdata concerning consumer demand typically show considerable variation in real expenditures, but very little variation in prices. We propose a semiparametric strategy for the consumer demand problem in which expenditure share equations are estimated Pendakur gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through its standard re...

The authors study the effect that consumers’ adopted shopping patterns have on their responsiveness to pricing activity of retailers. Two important dimensions of shopping behavior — inclination to switch stores and preference for a particular retail price format (every day low price (EDLP) or promotional price (HILO)) are hypothesized to systematically affect the responsiveness of in-store expe...

Previous work by the author used Markov Latent Class Analysis (MLCA) to make aggregate estimates of the underreporting of household expenditure by category (e.g. clothes, furniture, and electricity) by exploiting the four interview, rotating panel design of the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey (CE). This analysis collapsed a few years of the CE into a pooled single panel. Estimates from th...

This research uses microdata from the 1986 Statistics Canada Family Expenditure S u ~ e y and from the 1986-88 U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey to estimate equivalence scales using a methodology which is very similar to that employed by Statistics Canada for the estimation of Low-Income Cutoffs. Employing identical sample selection criteria and identically specified models, we find that equival...

Significant economic changes have occurred in Lithuania since 1992. Major market reforms were introduced through phased liberalization of producer and consumer prices. Panel data from a Lithuanian Household Budget Survey conducted during 1992-94 were used to estimate demand parameters for aggregated commodity groups. The evidence from the household survey shows the relative stability of demand ...

We develop and test a simple model of limited attention in intertemporal choice. The model posits that individuals fully attend to consumption in all periods but fail to attend to some future lumpy expenditure opportunities. This asymmetry generates some predictions that overlap with models of present-bias. Our model also generates the unique predictions that reminders may increase saving, and ...