The purpose of this paper is to study whether trade frictions in durable goods markets help account for the patterns of household consumption expenditures observed in the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), namely that the response of durable goods expenditures to income shocks is 78 percent larger than that of nondurable goods and the variance of the idiosyncratic part of log durable goods expe...

Governments in emerging markets often behave like a “tormented insurer”, trying to use non-state-contingent debt instruments to avoid cuts in payments to private agents despite large fluctuations in public revenues. In the data, average public debt-GDP ratios decline as the variability of revenues increases, primary balances and current expenditures follow cyclical patterns sharply at odds with...

in this commentary, we argue for the implementation of a sugar-sweetened beverage (ssb) tax as a tool to help address the global obesity and diabetes epidemics. consumption of ssbs has increased exponentially over the last several decades, a trend that has been an important contributor to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. prior evidence demonstrates that a ssb tax will likely decrease ssb con...

The existence of durable goods implies that the welfare flow from consumption cannot be directly associated with total consumption expenditures. As a result, tests of standard theories of consumption (such as the Permanent Income Hypothesis, or PIH) typically focus on nondurable goods and services. Specifically, these studies generally relate real consumption of nondurable goods and services to...

A S HEALTH CARE spending continues to grow, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) plans to develop a satellite account containing a detailed set of macroeconomic statistics for spending on medical care. This account would provide the data needed to better assess health care spending and its effects on the U.S. economy. In particular, the new statistics would allow health economists to better an...

BACKGROUND This paper examines whether individuals facing the threat of poverty are curtailing their consumption of various goods and services in a given order and, if among the expenditures that are cut back, there are also health expenditures. The location of individuals in this order of cutback is then used to derive the degree of their deprivation and the factors that affect the extent of t...

BACKGROUND Inequality in households' payments on food and health expenditures presents the accessibility and utilization patterns between them. This study investigated the Iranian rural and urban households' inequality in payments on food and Out-of-Pocket health expenditures from 1998 to 2012. METHODS This descriptive study was conducted through the analysis of Iranian Statistics Centre data...

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about economic inequality in India during the post-reform period. We analyze consumption inequality through the hitherto neglected lens of nonfood expenditure. Using household level consumption expenditure data from the quinquennial “thick” rounds of the NSS, we show that inequality within food and non-food groups has declined, even as overall expend...