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"Browning, Martin"
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Economics of the family
\"The family is a complex decision unit in which partners with potentially different objectives make consumption, work, and fertility decisions. Couples marry and divorce partly based on their ability to coordinate these activities, which in turn depends on how well they are matched. This book provides a comprehensive, modern, and self-contained account of the research in the growing area of family economics. The first half of the book develops several alternative models of family decision making. Particular attention is paid to the collective model and its testable implications. The second half discusses household formation and dissolution and who marries whom. Matching models with and without frictions are analyzed and the important role of within-family transfers is explained. The implications for marriage, divorce, and fertility are discussed. The book is intended for graduate students in economics and for researchers in other fields interested in the economic approach to the family\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Non-parametric Analysis of Time-Inconsistent Preferences
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.
Journal Article
Estimating Consumption Economies of Scale, Adult Equivalence Scales, and Household Bargaining Power
How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple's expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these. We model households in terms of the utility functions of its members, a bargaining or social welfare function, and a consumption technology function. We demonstrate generic non-parametric identification of the model, and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call \"indifference scales\", as well as consumption economies of scale, the household's resource sharing rule or members' bargaining power, and other related concepts.
Journal Article
Income and Consumption
We develop a model of consumption and income that allows for pervasive heterogeneity in the parameters of both processes. Introducing codependence between household income parameters and preference parameters, we also allow for heterogeneity in the impact of income shocks on consumption. We estimate the parameters of themodel using a sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, covering the period 1968–2009. We find considerable codependent heterogeneity in the parameters governing income and consumption processes. Our results suggest a great deal of heterogeneity in the reaction of consumption to income shocks, highlighting the heterogeneity in the self-insurance available to households.
Journal Article
Housing Wealth and Consumption: A Micro Panel Study
There is strong evidence that house prices and consumption are synchronised. There is, however, disagreement over the causes of this link. This study examines if there is a wealth effect of house prices on consumption. Using a household‐level panel data set with information about house ownership, income, wealth and demographics for a large sample of the Danish population in the period 1987–96, we model the dependence of the growth rate of total household expenditure with unanticipated innovations to house prices. Controlling for factors related to competing explanations, we find little evidence of a housing wealth effect.
Journal Article
Estimating Intertemporal Allocation Parameters using Synthetic Residual Estimation
We present a novel structural estimation procedure for models of intertemporal allocation. This is based on modelling expectations errors directly; we refer to it as synthetic residual estimation (SRE). The flexibility of SRE allows us to account for measurement error in consumption and for heterogeneity in intertemporal allocation parameters. An investigation of the small sample properties of the SRE estimator indicates that it dominates generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation of both exact and approximate Euler equations in the case when we have short panels and noisy consumption data. We apply SRE to two panels drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and estimate the joint distribution of the discount factor and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. We reject strongly homogeneity of the discount factor and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. We find that, on average, the more educated are more patient and less willing to substitute intertemporally than the less educated. Within education strata, patience and willingness to substitute are positively correlated.
Journal Article
Modelling Income Processes with Lots of Heterogeneity
We model earnings processes allowing for lots of heterogeneity across agents. We also introduce an extension to the linear ARMA model which allows the initial convergence in the long run to be different from that implied by the conventional ARMA model. This is particularly important for unit root tests, which are actually tests of a composite of two independent hypotheses. We fit to a variety of statistics including most of those considered by previous investigators. We use a sample drawn from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and focus on white males with a high-school degree. Despite this observable homogeneity, we find more latent heterogeneity than previous investigators. We show that allowance for heterogeneity makes substantial differences to estimates of model parameters and to outcomes of interest. Additionally, we find strong evidence against the hypothesis that any worker has a unit root.
Journal Article
Efficient Intra-Household Allocations and Distribution Factors: Implications and Identification
This paper provides an exhaustive characterization of testability and identifiability issues in the collective framework in the absence of price variation; it thus provides a theoretical underpinning for a number of empirical works that have been developed recently. We first provide a simple and general test of the Pareto-efficiency hypothesis, which is consistent with all possible assumptions on the private or public nature of goods, all possible consumption externalities between household members, and all types of interdependent individual preferences and domestic production technology. The test is proved to be necessary and sufficient. We then provide conditions for the identification of the sharing rule and the Engel curves of individual household members for a variety of different observational schemes.
Journal Article
Best Nonparametric Bounds on Demand Responses
This paper uses revealed preference inequalities to provide the tightest possible (best) nonparametric bounds on predicted consumer responses to price changes using consumer-level data over a finite set of relative price changes. These responses are allowed to vary nonparametrically across the income distribution. This is achieved by combining the theory of revealed preference with the semiparametric estimation of consumer expansion paths (Engel curves). We label these expansion path based bounds on demand responses as E-bounds. Deviations from revealed preference restrictions are measured by preference perturbations which are shown to usefully characterize taste change and to provide a stochastic environment within which violations of revealed preference inequalities can be assessed.
Journal Article
Shocks, Stocks, and Socks: Smoothing Consumption Over a Temporary Income Loss
We investigate how households in temporarily straitened circumstances due to an unemployment spell cut back on expenditures and how they spend marginal dollars of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit. Our theoretical and empirical analyses emphasize the importance of allowing for the fact that households buy durable as well as non-durable goods. The theoretical analysis shows that in the short run households can cut back significantly on total expenditures without a significant fall in welfare if they concentrate their budget reductions on durables. We then present an empirical analysis based on a Canadian survey of workers who experienced a job separation. Exploiting changes in the unemployment insurance system over our sample period we show that cuts in UI benefits lead to reductions in total expenditure with a stronger impact on clothing than on food expenditures. Our empirical strategy allows that these expenditures may be non-separable from employment status. The effects we find are particularly strong for households with no liquid assets before the spell started. These qualitative findings are in precise agreement with the theoretical predictions.
Journal Article