Consumer behaviour

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The rapid growth in income inequality in the UK over the 1980s has excited a good deal of interest and concern.

Taxes on alcohol are among the oldest in the UK and are still an important source of tax revenue.

Much of the debate over inequality in the UK has focused on household incomes. This study provides details of trends in household spending levels. It finds that the inequality of household expenditures has risen much more slowly over the 1980s than the inequality of household incomes.

This report looks at some of the economic issues surrounding the current system of alcohol taxes in the UK and considers how far current taxes on alcohol are sustainable as European integration proceeds.

In this paper we use household level data on income and expenditure to analyse the importance of precautionary saving in the UK.

We argue that once one departs from simple classroom example, or 'stripped down life-cycle model', the empirical model for consumption growth can be made flexible enough to fit the main features of the data.

Two competing explanations of the UK consumer boom in the late 1980s are the financial liberalisation-imperfect housing market hypothesis of Muellbauer and Murphy and the expectations hypothesis of King. The authors use 15 years of Family Expenditure Surveys, and cohort analysis, to investigate to what extent these two hypotheses agree with observed changes in consumption patterns.

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption.