We present estimates of spending on children from a Danish expenditure survey which asks respondents directly about allocations of expenditures to individual household members. Our main finding is ...that the average Danish family allocates 44% of total assignable spending on non-food non-durables and services to children. There is considerable variation across households. More is spent on older children and expenditure on children is an increasing concave function of the number of 'equivalent' children. We find that households in which the mother has had a child by a previous partner spend 24% less on children than otherwise similar households.
This laboratory experiment studies two-stage contests between political parties. In the first stage, parties run their primaries, and in the second stage, the winners of the primaries compete in the ...general election. The resource expenditures in the first stage by the winning candidates are partially or fully carried over to the second stage. Experimental results support all major theoretical predictions: the first-stage expenditures and the total expenditures increase, while the second-stage expenditures decrease in the carryover rate. Consistent with the theory, the total expenditures increase in the number of candidates and the number of parties. Contrary to the theory, however, expenditures in both stages of the competition exceed theoretical predictions. Disclosing information about the opponent's expenditures in the first stage increases the second-stage expenditures and decreases the first-stage expenditures.
A burgeoning body of literature highlights asymmetric information among household members. However, little is known about the source of the asymmetry and its effect on efficiency. Using a unique ...survey of Ghanaian households, we examine the accuracy of spousal cross reports and the effect of discrepancies on farm production. We find that information problems pertain to scale (the quantity of resources) and scope (the distribution of resources), as well as allocation decisions on the margin (Engel curves). Moreover, we find that information asymmetries lead to inefficiency in production, and the effect is equivalent to about 15% of the variation across households.
In many research areas it is desirable to have information on household total expenditure ('consumption'). We draw evidence from several sources on the usefulness of recall consumption questions. We ...conclude that valid information can be collected by adding specific recall questions to general purpose surveys, and provide recommendations on how to do so.
Graduation rates (GRs) remain one of the most frequently applied measures of institutional performance. This paper analyzes the relationship between university characteristics and GRs in Spain, using ...a dataset for the entire public university system over the period 1998–2008. Since we observe the same university over several years, we address the problem of institutional unobserved heterogeneity for the first time. The main findings that can be drawn from our results are that university features, such as expenditure, student–teacher ratio and financial-aid to students are important in accounting for GRs. Surprisingly, student ability has no significant impact explaining graduation, a result that can be justified given the features of the Spanish university system.
It is shown that in a nonparametric nonseparable triangular system, the conditional moment restriction (CMR) does not identify the average structural function (ASF). The CMR identifies the ASF only ...if the model is structurally separable in observable covariates and unobservable random errors. This excludes, for instance, random coefficient models in which the CMR in general does not identify the average response. An implication of our results is that empirical researchers should use methods other than CMR if they want to estimate the average response in models that are not additively separable.
A Residential Energy Demand System for Spain Labandeira, Xavier; Labeaga, José M.; Rodríguez, Miguel
The Energy journal (Cambridge, Mass.),
01/2006, Letnik:
27, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Sharp price fluctuations and increasing environmental and distributional concerns, among other issues, have led to a renewed academic interest in energy demand. In this paper we estimate, for the ...first time in Spain, an energy demand system with household microdata. In doing so, we tackle several econometric and data problems that are generally recognized to bias parameter estimates. This is obviously relevant, as obtaining correct price and income responses is essential if they may be used for assessing the economic consequences of hypothetical or real changes. With this objective, we combine data sources for a long time period and choose a demand system with flexible income and price responses. We also estimate the model in different sub-samples to capture varying responses to energy price changes by households living in rural, intermediate and urban areas. This constitutes a first attempt in the literature and it proved to be a very successful choice.
This paper uses unique Spanish panel data on household expenditures to test whether unobservable heterogeneity in household demands (taste, etc.) is correlated with total expenditures (income). The ...main finding is that tastes are indeed correlated with income for about half of the goods considered, implying that cross-sectional estimates of income elasticities for these goods are biased. The goods are the following: food eaten outside home, alcohol and tobacco, transportation, and energy. The elasticity of alcohol and tobacco is more than halved when taking unobserved heterogeneity into account. For transportation, the bias is sufficiently large to misclassify the good as a luxury.
This paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income, provided by a change in United Kingdom Family Allowance policy to test the income-pooling hypothesis implied by ...unitary household models. Expenditure shares are estimated for a wide range of goods using household-level data. Shifts in expenditure shares suggest that children and mothers benefited at the expense of fathers when this policy change shifted income within households from men to women. Similar shifts are not found among married-couple households with no children. This paper refutes income pooling, and confirms and extends results in Lundberg, Pollak, and Wales (1997).
We investigate the feasibility of deriving a measure of total expenditure at the household level from administrative micro-data on income and wealth. We use Danish administrative data that provides ...measures of disposable income and the holding of different assets at the end of the year. The ability to link the households in the 1994-6 Danish Expenditure Survey to their administrative data for the years around the survey year offers a unique possibility for constructing a measure of total expenditure and of checking directly on the reliability of the imputation. The results are promising.
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