Consumer behaviour

This briefing note provides an overview of the social housing system. Except where stated otherwise, it focuses on the system in operation in England: many of the institutional and policy details differ in the other nations of the UK, and a full treatment of those is beyond the scope of this survey. However, some of the basic facts about social housing can be provided at a Great Britain or UK level, and we do that where possible (making clear the distinction).

Social housing providers (local authorities and housing associations) fulfill at least three functions: building housing, acting as landlord and delivering subsidised rent levels. This report focuses on the last of these. Specifically, we analyse the consequences for tenants, social housing providers and the exchequer of changing the level of rent charged to tenants in social housing. We do not take a view as to what level is appropriate, or look at wider policy issues in the social housing system.

This Thinkpiece on pensions taxation was published by The Chartered Insurance Institute on 21 October 2015.

The objective of this paper is to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better informal insurance.

In this paper, we advance the current literature by shedding light on both the motivation for providing intergenerational transfers, and on the nature of preferences for such giving behaviour, by using experimental techniques and revealed preference methods.

The authors work with a finite data set where each observation consists of a bundle of contingent consumption chosen by an agent from a constraint set of such bundles. They develop a general procedure for testing the consistency of this data set with a broad class of models of choice under risk and under uncertainty.

The authors develop a new quantile-based panel data framework to study the nature of income persistence and the transmission of income shocks to consumption.

This working paper was published in February 2014 by the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford. In the paper, Manski's (1993) standard linear-in-means model is used to estimate endogenous peer effects on the awareness of vulnerable groups on Tanzania Social Action Fund II (TASAFII), i.e. Tanzania's flagship community-driven development programme.

This paper provides a framework for identifying preferences in a large network under the assumption of pairwise stability of network links.

In this paper the authors show that theory-consistent demand analysis remains feasible in the presence of partially observed prices, and hence partially observed implied budget sets, even if we are agnostic about the nature of the missing prices.

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.