aggregate employment and intertemporal substitution in the uk in this paper the author sets up estimates and tests an explicit model of aggregate labor supply based on the intertemporal substitution hypothesis the model is derived as the optimal decision rule of an infinitely living household maximizing an intertemporal ces utility function over consumption and leisure the evidence suggests that for aggregate employee hours the model is rejected but that for the total number of employees in employment the estimates are broadly consistent with the theory the assumed constant elasticity of substitution is estimated at around 0 2 and this estimate implies a short run real wage and real interest rate elasticity of labor supply of the same order copyright 1987 by royal economic society

u s money demand structural shifts or heterogeneous agents this paper examines whether observed structural shifts in the money demand function could be the result of agent heterogeneity due to different household income levels following the methodology of stoker 1986 income distribution variables are found to be significant determinants of money demand and once changes in the distribution of income are accounted for there is no evidence of parameter instability a money demand function incorporating income distribution effects is shown to perform as well or better than several standard alternatives on the basis of diagnostic tests non nested hypothesis tests within sample prediction errors and out of sample forecasting

testing an alternative habit persistence model marshall long ago noted the phenomenon of past consumption being highly correlated with current consumption if habit was indeed a major determinant of current consumption behavior then the neoclassical theory of utility maximization should take it into account a rigorous incorporation of habit formation into consumer theory began with gorman 12 pollak 21 22 23 laid out the theoretical conditions that needed to be satisfied in order for habit persistence to be consistent with the utility maximizing model of consumer behavior competent empirical work in this area was done initially by houthakker and taylor 14 with subsequent studies by manser 16 phlips 18 19 pollak and wales 24 anderson and blundell 2 and blanciforti and green 8 these papers have focused on examining the impact of measured past consumption on current consumption blundell 9 provides a comprehensive review of this literature

estimating theoretically consistent demand systems using cointegration techniques with application to greek food data abstract the use of time series techniques cointegration and error correction models has been offered as a potentially promising way in estimating demand systems that resolve the perennial issue of violating the theoretical postulates of homogeneity and symmetry the empirical results of this paper based on linearized aids and greek food data indicate that sample size aggregation schemes and model specification seem to be important factors in the estimation of a theoretically consistent demand system they also show that homogeneity is sensitive to sample size while symmetry is sensitive to the aggregation scheme adopted

weak separability and the estimation of elasticities in multistage demand systems the necessary conditions for multistage budgeting to be at least approximately justified are reviewed and the plausibility of these assumptions i e weak separability and low variability of price indices with utility level are discussed using no further assumptions simple relationships between expenditure and price elasticities in different budgeting levels are derived these results are applied to a three stage model for swedish food consumption and it is shown that the assumptions are not inappropriate restricting the analysis to the last stage of a multistage budgeting process is also shown to lead to considerable errors which could well have policy consequences

advertising and food drink and tobacco consumption in the united kingdom a dynamic demand system this paper tests for the influence of advertising on the inter product distribution of consumer demand for non durable goods and services in the uk 1963 1996 the long run demand for seven categories of non durable products is modelled through an advertising augmented version of the almost ideal demand system aids which is incorporated into an error correction model to allow for short run dynamic adjustments to long run equilibrium positions model estimates confirm that the restrictions of price homogeneity and symmetry appear to be consistent with the data yield measures of the various types of demand elasticity that are in general plausible confirm the strong influence of prices on the allocation of consumer expenditure but find little evidence to support the hypothesis that advertising has the power to effect marked changes in the inter product pattern of consumer demand in the uk

some evidence on the performance of size correction factors in testing consumer demand models abstract simulation experiments with the rotterdam model show that restricting the covariance matrix and using its unbiased estimate is quite helpful when performing the wald test while application of italianer s correction factor works quite well when using the likelihood ratio test

information health risk beliefs and the demand for fats and oils mean and variance measures of health information about cholesterol and saturated fat are included in a demand system for fats and oils a bayesian model of health risk belief and consumer awareness surveys are the basis for computing these measures the empirical demand model shows that health information has resulted in significant increases in consumption for corn cottonseed and soybean oils and decreased consumption for butter and lard the predicted demand effects based on the bayesian information model are more reasonable than predictions from using either a time trend or a simple cumulative cholesterol information index copyright 1995 by mit press

compositional change aggregation and dynamic factor demand estimates on a panel of manufacturing firms most empirical research on investment and dynamic factor demand has used aggregated data the large number of authors who have cited this as a source of problems strongly suggests possible benefits from analyzing individual firm data this paper presents an analysis of a panel dataset of us manufacturing firms several models based on cost minimization and a three factor cobb douglas technology are developed the differences concern whether the technology varies across two digit sic industries the presence of fixed adjustment lags and the determinants of adjustment costs identification relies on the rational expectations hypothesis and estimation on non linear 3sls the estimates indicate that versions with the adjustment lag perform better than others conditional elasticities reveal that factor demand responds rapidly to anticipated changes in output and factor prices a finding consistent with other recent work it appears that the factor demand of large firms is more price sensitive and less sensitive to output than small firms consistent with recent work on credit market imperfections comparison of the results based on the pooled and the industry varying technologies indicate that the use of aggregate data is indeed a source of problems

aggregation effects on price and expenditure elasticities in a quadratic almost ideal demand system while it is well known that demand elasticities calculated at the macro level will in general differ from those calculated at the micro level because of aggregation effects there remain the questions of how large the effects are and how they vary with the degree of nonuniformity in the income distribution we explore those questions with models based on a quadratic version of the almost ideal demand system we investigate the elasticity differences theoretically and then calibrate the models and generate numerical results using income data for seven countries with widely different distributions the aggregation effects are found generally to be rather small even with highly nonuniform income distributions

klem substitutability a dynamic flexible demand system 1990 klem substitutability a dynamic flexible demand system applied economics vol 22 no 2 pp 275 283

a test of the habit formation hypothesis using household data numerous studies have confirmed the importance of habit formation as represented by a lagged dependent variable in demand analysis although all work to date has been based on aggregate time series data this study uses household level bls interview panel data to test the habit hypothesis an interrelated demand system for seventeen goods is estimated from cross section data and compared with a similar system based on time series data the results show that the habit component is significantly different between the two data sets and much smaller in the cross section data habit effects while not as large in cross section data as time series are still highly significant several explanations are offered concerning why the two sets of estimates differ copyright 1991 by mit press

bread and peace voting in u s presidential elections a simple bread and peace model shows that aggregate votes forpresident in postwar elections were determined entirely byweighted average growth of real disposable personal income percapita during the incumbent party s term and the cumulativenumbers of american military personnel killed in action as aresult of u s intervention in the korean and vietnamese civilwars the model is subjected to robustness tests against twenty two variations in functional form inspired by the extensiveliterature on presidential voting not one of these variationsadds value to the bread and peace model or significantly perturbsits coefficients

testing short run factor demand models in canadian and u s agriculture equilibrium factor demand models are being replaced by a variety of short run and dynamic models in empirical production research in this paper the authors provide evidence on the usefulness of short run production models in aggregate canadian and american agriculture from 1961 to 1982 they offer an alternative data based dynamic model which encompasses the short run model this permits them to test for the short run models and for two simple dynamic models in favor of their most general dynamic model

a cointegrated vecm demand system for meat in italy this article applies cointegration techniques to estimate a monthly demand system for meat in italy in contrast to existing studies where engle and granger s two step procedure and triangular vector error correction model tvecm representations are usually exploited it applies a cointegrated vector error correction model vecm where also prices and expenditure enter endogenously the system and the cointegration rank is not assumed to be known a priori but subject to inference it highlights some of the advantages of using the vecm compared to the tvecm including the possibility of testing the cointegration rank of the system and the weak and strong exogeneity of prices and expenditure within a well specified statistical model this may lead to remarkable improvements in the efficiency of parameters system estimates

nesting the aids and translog demand systems this paper shows that there exists a relatively simple demand model that is consistent with utility maximization and has nested within it both the almost ideal demand system and translog models this model is exactly aggregated then estimated using aggregate u s demand data the results are used to test the relative adequacy of the almost ideal demand system and translog models copyright 1989 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

a semi nonparametric approach to the demand for uk monetary assets we estimate an asymptotically ideal model of the demand for uk personal sector monetary assets we use data that are consistent with utility maximizing behaviour and find that uk monetary assets are generally substitutes in use the estimated elasticities of substitution during the 1980s and the early 1990s indicate that a relatively broad monetary aggregate should be used in economic studies the results also suggest that any policy based on interest or user cost elasticities of substitution between financial assets should be based on the morishima elasticities as the allen uzawa calculation can give misleading results

cost sharing versus block funding in a federal system a demand systems approach this paper employs a maximizing framework consistent with the axioms of consumer preference to analyze local government s choice of spending on different social services within this framework it is possible to include both block funding and cost sharing intergovernment transfer schemes canada s movement to block funding from the cost sharing method of financing provincial expenditures on hospitals medical care and post secondary education is analyzed the results indicate that the provincial governments actions are generally consistent with a significant maximizing model of consumer behavior and that the change to block funding had a significant impact on real provincial funding of some previously cost shared social services

a practical log linear aggregation method with examples heterogeneous income growth in the usa a practical aggregation method for heterogeneous log linear functions is presented inequality measures are employed in the construction of a simple but exact aggregate representation of an economy three macroeconomic applications are discussed the aggregation of the lucas supply function the time inconsistent behaviour of an egalitarian social planner facing heterogeneous discount rates and the case of a simple heterogeneous growth model in the latter application aggregate cps data is used to show that the slowdown that followed the first oil shock is worse than usually thought and that the new economy growth resurgence is not as strong as it appears

behavioral heterogeneity and the income effect inspired by the recent literature on aggregation theory this paper introduces hits a semiparametric model of consumer demand that allows for diversity in tastes the strong variation of budget shares observed across income groups has two possible origins the individual income effect and taste differences between poor and rich households consumer surveys reporting repeated cross sections do not permit the direct measurement of these two effects in hits linear heterogeneity allows the gmm estimation of structural coefficients on an aggregate series the joint density of spending and tastes is then recovered from cross sections by a nonparametric procedure involving a deconvolution we estimate the model on british data 1968 1998 and report that taste heterogeneity explains a large fraction of the variation of budget shares with income

dynamic factor demand equations in u s and canadian agriculture abstract this research provides one of the first empirical estimates of a data based dynamic factor demand model for american and canadian agriculture models such as these deserve more widespread use in the empirical analysis of agriculture these models have the advantage that they do not impose inappropriate dynamics on the data rather they permit the data to select the appropriate dynamics we use a model originally developed by anderson and blundell this model is a general first order dynamic model which contains as testable hypothesis several simpler models this model permits us to estimate the long run agricultural production structure as a subset of the dynamic parameter estimates we will test this long run structure for symmetry homotheticity and neutral technical change the estimated models may be used to test for three alternative dynamic structures in the limit dynamics may not be needed and we can test for the static long run equilibrium model two intermediate cases are the autoregressive and the partial adjustment models which are simpler than the general model but still include dynamics our results suggest that the long run equilibrium model is unsatisfactory in both countries a dynamic model is needed in both countries the two more restricted dynamic models are rejected the general dynamic model is required in canada the long run equilibrium structure is homothetic with neutral technical change in the united states homotheticity is also accepted but neutral technical change is rejected

an investigation into the demand for alcoholic beverages in canada a choice between the almost ideal and the rotterdam models in this article i investigate the historical pattern of interactions in the demand for three categories of alcoholic beverages in canada using both the differential almost ideal and the differential rotterdam demand systems i evaluate these models based on several decision criteria including model encompassment based on the j test structural stability conformity with demand theory and the credibility of the estimated price and income responses in an attempt to determine which of these models is better suited for explaining the demand for alcoholic beverages the results reveal that both models satisfy the restrictions of demand theory and of structural stability but the rotterdam model is preferable on grounds of the remaining two criteria

the implications of tourism specialisation in the long run an econometric analysis for 13 oecd economies abstract the paper aims to illumine the longrun impact of specialisation in tourism it is shown that specialisation in tourism may not be deleterious for economic welfare once the terms of trade are considered conditions for an improvement in welfare are laid out and their existence tested by econometric methods within an almost ideal demand system formulation of tourist expenditure for 13 oecd economies the analysis uses cointegration techniques and novel sequential break dating procedures evaluated where the time dimension is small the values of the estimated parameters suggest that long run growth may not be harmed by tourism specialisation

nonmonotonic demand for income redistribution benefits the case of afdc two different motives are often advanced to explain taxpayer nonrecipient support for income redistribution programs the first motive is the result of interdependent utilities between nonrecipients and the recipients of redistribution program benefits the source of this interdependence could be taxpayer altruism alternatively redistribution might be seen as one way to alleviate the potential for crime or social unrest recent theoretical analyses have suggested a second motiveincome redistribution programs act as protection against the possibility of unforseen loss in personal income 5 6 21 32 researchers using panel data find widespread random and temporary movements in individual income poverty and welfare program use that would seem to suggest a potentially significant insurance demand for redistribution programs 2 the results from one study for example indicate that while four to five percent of the total u s population could be classified as persistent recipients of welfare program benefits between 1969 and 1978 receiving program benefits in at least five of those years over one quarter of the u s population participated in welfare programs at least once over this same ten year period 9 74 in the past researchers estimating nonrecipient support for income transfer programs have considered only one of these two motives while ignoring the other 3 this paper extends the examination of the demand for income redistribution by integrating the public good and social insurance demand motives into one model the first part of the paper sets up the individual s decision model for income redistribution one consequence of interacting the public good and social insurance motives into one model is that support for higher benefit payments is expected to come from the tails of the income distribution low income individuals both recipients and nonrecipients benefit directly from the reduced risk of income randomness while high income

an empirical comparison of flexible demand system functional forms this paper compares the performance of eight frequently used flexible forms that are either 1 locally flexible 2 effectively globally regular or 3 asymptotically globally flexible results show that the functions with global properties generally perform better particularly those models having asymptotic properties results using us consumption data indicate substitutability among the components of consumption at most data points there is also some interesting substitution volatility around the time of recessions in the usa copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

time varying intercepts and equilibrium analysis an extension of the dynamic almost ideal demand model demographic effects and user costs in demand systems have usually been modelled explicitly a more robust approach is a state space formulation of the demand system where time varying intercepts account for the effects of unobservable variables the author embeds such a system in a vector autoregressive distributed lag model with a bayesian hierarchical prior the model is estimated by a markov chain monte carlo method on samples involving quarterly us and uk data in the us case the results are compared with a previously published cointegration analysis of the same data copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

habit formation and demand for sugar sweetened beverages using scanner data we estimated demand for nine nonalcoholic beverages under habit formation we found strong evidence for habit formation although demand for sugar sweetened beverages by low income households is less elastic to own price changes compared with high income households there is evidence that high income households consider beverages to be more substitutable than low income households do a half cent per ounce tax on store purchased sugar sweetened beverages will result in a moderate reduction in consumption of sugar sweetened beverages for both income strata because of habit formation long run national tax revenue from a sugar sweetened beverage tax is about 15 to 20 lower than short run revenue

interrelated factor demands from dynamic cost functions an application to the non energy business sector of the uk economy in this paper we propose a dynamic cost function which allows us consistently to derive a set of dynamic interrelated factor demand equations in the general error correction form introduced by anderson and blundell 1982 this paper expands results recently published in urga 1996 it shows that the derivation of an effective underlying cost function allows us to identify the full set of parameters of the underlying process this does not happen in the standard anderson blundell formulation we report an empirical exercise used to model the so called supply side of the london busines school large scale economic model where we estimate both the set of factor demands and the underlying dynamic cost function for the non energy business sector of the uk economy

a simple nonadditive preference structure for models of household behavior over time intertemporal separability is an almost universal assumption in empirical work on household behavior but a good deal of recent work on consumption and labor supply suggests that it may not be tenable the traditional weakening of this assumption is to allow for habit formation i propose an alternative structure for intertemporal preferences that nests intertemporal additivity in a simple way and yields closed form solutions for demand functions this structure includes the neoclassical durables model as a special case i derive a demand system that nests the almost ideal system as its time separable counterpart this model is estimated on u k aggregate time series data for seven goods time separability is decisively rejected moreover i find that ignoring temporal dependencies leads to considerable bias in the estimates of elasticities of the seven goods durables display the strongest nonseparable effect the estimated reactions are consistent with the neoclassical durables model

empirical modelling of the aggregation error in the representative consumer model this paper examines different approaches to modelling the aggregation error associated with the representative consumer model each approach is based on an analytical framework intended for modelling aggregate time series data on quantities and prices with potential additional measures of income distribution simple functions that track aggregation error over time are found to perform better than more complex and theoretically sophisticated models an explanation is given based on typical time series characteristics of economic data

voluntary export restraints and rationing u k leather footwear imports from eastern europe following the imposition of a quantitative import restriction someone somewhere must be quantity rationed concentrating on demand we develop methods to test and allow for the presence of rationing in the estimation of demand equations and in the calculation of the welfare effects of quantitative restrictions using a ces model we analyse the voluntary export restraints on u k imports of two types of leather footwear from comecon countries the results suggest that even if prices did not rise to clear the market u k consumers could have lost up to 60 million in 1986 from these restrictions

an intertemporal system of dynamic consumer demand functions abstract this paper constructs and estimates a system of dynamic consumer demand equations under the assumption of rational expectations about anticipated human wealth the traditional one period budget constraint is replaced by the lifetime anticipated wealth constraint lagged dependent variables are rationalized by an adjustment cost argument in the model presented both the dynamic adjustment coefficients as well as the parameters characterizing the underlying long run preferences are identified and can be estimated we find that a weak version of the reh cannot be rejected on the data in common with most empirical studies on demand behaviour we have to reject the symmetry restrictions

expenditure allocation across nondurables services durables and savings an empirical study of separability in the long run the separability of categories of consumption expenditures and savings are empirically examined in the context of an error correction model of aggregate quarterly expenditure allocations in canada some evidence is found for separability of consumption allocations from savings in both the long run structure and short run dynamics of the model lending some support to the use of the assumption in modelling consumption behaviour

testing dynamic specification for import demand models the case of cotton error correction models impose few prior restrictions on dynamic model specification and allow the data to determine model structure despite this obvious advantage few applications have adopted the error correction model to explain trade flows an error correction model of cotton import demand is estimated for france japan and hongkong a variety of tests are applied to determine the dynamic structure of the model it is found that the most general models are those that best fit the data for cotton import demand long run elasticities from these general models are significantly different than elasticities derived from a comparable static model

multinational firms and the theory of international trade and investment tinational corporation in the arena of economic activity and political influence trade theorists have either ignored it or expressed unguarded skepticism at the ability of the conventional trade models to successfully capture and analyze the features of this new phenomenon the purpose of this paper is twofold first by building upon the contribution by richard caves we will show that the traditional trade models can be adapted in a way that preserves most if not all of the attributes introduced by international firms 2 second we will conduct a comparative statics analysis to explore the implications of tariffs and taxes for resource allocation and international capital movements our results here confirm what has already been well established in myriad empirical studies that maturation of the international firm has vastly increased economic interdependence among trading countries and that few nations can eschew the ripples caused by economic policies of other nations 3

price premium for high efficiency refrigerators and calculation of price elasticities for close substitutes a methodology using hedonic pricing and demand systems this article uses the hedonic pricing method to estimate the price premium paid for the highest energy efficiency label a in the refrigerators market of the basque autonomous community spain the estimated figure is 8 9 of the final price or about 60 euro which represents one third of the energy savings that a consumer gets during the lifetime of a refrigerator with the highest energy efficiency label this figure is then combined with the linear version of the almost ideal demand system la aids to obtain own and cross price elasticities of demand the information presented here is useful for policy design and analysis the results indicate that the demand for refrigerators with the highest energy efficiency label is highly sensitive to price variations

consumer behaviour in greece an application of the almost ideal demand system this paper estimates the almost ideal demand system on greek data for the period 1960 1986 for seven commodity groups the results conform with earlier research findings that the homogeneity and symmetry restrictions of demand theory are broadly inconsistent with the data the imposition of the restrictions leads to substantial changes in the estimated elasticities in both the static and dynamic specifications the introduction of habit effects with lagged consumption supported statistically by the data led to plausible results leaving however the problem of rejection of homogeneity and symmetry intact

simple tests of distributional effects on macroeconomic equations the presence of distributional effects in macroeconomic equations is shown to coincide with nonlinearity in micro behavioral relationships parameters estimated with aggregate data as in representative agent models contain distributional biases that are not measurable using aggregate data alone tests for distributional effects and other measures of the extent of aggregation problems are derived using distributional data observed over time significant distributional effects are noted for a model of annual aggregate u s commodity expenditure data a static model that accommodates individual heterogeneity is found to be statistically equivalent to a simply dynamic model that accommodates first order autocorrelation

estimation of a continuous time dynamic demand system a continuous time dynamic model of consumers demand explicitly taking account of the roles of depreciation interest rates habits and stocks is estimated using recently developed techniques from discrete quarterly uk data on three broad commodity groupings the results suggest that whilst being a significant determinant of demand the actual magnitude of the influence of changes in interest rates may be relatively small in the long run the cross price effects of durable goods are also found to be statistically significant and symmetry of long run compensated price responses is not rejected copyright 1992 john wiley sons ltd

non marketable assets and households portfolio choices a case study of italy abstract this paper analyzes the determinants of aggregate households portfolio choices conditional on those components of wealth which can be regarded as highly or totally illiquid because of the existence of substantial transaction costs and or institutional constraints on agents behaviour the empirical analysis broadly confirms the importance of the above mentioned institutional aspects in the allocation of financial wealth and provides the means for addressing some interesting questions regarding the behavior of portfolio holders in financial markets in particular it is shown that the presence of non tradable assets changes the risk premia on marketable assets hence in cases such as the italian one where the state is both the issuer of government securities and the collector of social security funds the positive correlation due to a common default risk between returns on government securities and on non marketable assets could lead to a higher cost of public debt financing

aggregation and simple dynamics the koyck geometric lag or ar 1 specification is a commonly proposed behavioral model sometimes after differencing the distribution of koyck lag or ar 1 coefficients across agents in an economy is shown to be completely identified just from the dynamic behavior of aggregate macroeconomic data aggregate testable implications of an economy composed of agents having koyck lags or ar 1 models are provided extensions to higher order and time varying lags are discussed aggregate u s consumption data are shown to support the hypothesis that some consumers have random walk consumption while the rest have arima 1 1 0 consumption with widely varying ar coefficients copyright 1994 by american economic association

an inverse demand analysis with introduction of quality effects an application to spanish consumption of fruit and vegetables this article analyzes consumer preference for fruit and vegetables when by using time series with socioeconomic characteristics of households there can be seemingly unobserved quality effects which are increased by aggregation the changes in spanish demand for fresh and processed fruit and vegetables over the period 1987 2000 are discussed following previous tests and analyses quantities are taken as predetermined and prices as matching the offer conditions thus quality effects based on the nutritional and or health value of the product are estimated from the error terms associated with the functions of the unit values quality variables are introduced as taste shifters in the inverse demand system laitinen theil model the results show the positive effects of quality differences on the normalized price for the group of products through own quality flexibilities and the negative effects between fresh and processed products through cross quality flexibilities

multinational firms and government policy abstract taxing mnc capital and subsidizing wages in a dual ldc economy increases national income if and only if mnc employment increases unemployment depends on the labour demand elasticity in the traditional sector and the percentage of labour in each sector

a flexible dynamic model of multiproduct technology for the west german economy this paper tests symmetry and negativity of the slutsky matrix for a system of demand functions derived from an aggregate model of multi product technology within a flexible dynamic framework the model considers three inputs and three outputs including imports and exports of intermediate goods we derive a static demand model from a trans log cost function and specify the data generation process by a stationary arx 1 1 model results based on west german quarterly data indicate that the integrability conditions are not rejected when imposed on the arx 1 1 model whereas they are rejected for all the less general dynamic models considered

costs of adjustment the aggregation problem and investment this paper looks at the empirical consequences of inappropriately using a representative firm to mimic the aggregate investment decisions of a group of heterogeneous firms faced with costs of adjusting capital inputs improper aggregation generates a bias with two important consequences 1 an apparent insensitivity of the aggregate capital stock to the user cost of capital and 2 predicted responses of the capital stock to shocks that are considerably slower than observed both of these consequences are features of available investment equations copyright 1992 by mit press

interrelated factor demands for manufacturing a dynamic translog cost function approach abstract in this paper we report the results of estimating a joint model for labour capital and energy using the transcendental logarithmic cost function of christensen jorgenson and lau 1973 this allows us to determine both the own price and cross elasticities of substitution between labour capital and energy we combine a model of factor shares with a dynamic adjustment process for each factor we also impose on the cross equation restrictions necessary to provide additivity homogeneity and symmetry since the covariance matrix in systems of share relationships is singular we follow the suggestions of anderson and blundell 1982 and employ a mullivariate error corrrection model the results suggest that additivity symmetry and homogeneity restrictions do hold and that there are short run increasing returns to scale

the role of theoretical restrictions in forecasting with inverse demand models in recent years the theoretical restrictions of consumer demand have been examined in post sample forecasting exercises however this work has uniformly ignored the concavity restrictions of consumer demand in this paper we evaluate a series of normalized quadratic inverse demand system nqids specifications using rolling windows and generating one to four step ahead forecasts to estimate the models eleven categories of south atlantic fish are used from 1980 through 2001 in addition to the nqids we also examine the forecasting performance of a purely time series model we find that the best predictions are achieved using a composite forecast

spanish food demand a dynamic approach other empirical works have demonstrated that spanish food demand seems to have a dynamic structure however the commonly used dynamization processes are too restrictive to explain the dynamic food consumers behaviour a more general model that is able to incorporate different dynamic structures partial adjustment first autoregressive and static and allows for direct estimation of long run coefficients has been used this general framework is applied to the generalized addilog demand system gads for annual spanish data covering 1964 to 1991 results indicate that an autoregressive gads fits well the data satisfying the theoretic restrictions finally the expenditure and price elasticities are calculated

elections and aggregation interpreting econometric analyses of local governments this paper analyzes the provision of local government service under the assumption that fiscal policy is set by local officials in order to maximize the expected number of votes in the next election the model includes both the widely used median voter model and the average voter model as special cases further it is a convenient framework for empirical analyses numerical simulations indicate that the vote maximization model is capable of producing levels of government spending either greater or less than those predicted by the median voter model while exhibiting similar responses to changes in incomes grants prices etc thus the model captures the advantages of the median voter model without its objectionable features many avenues for further work remain i will mention briefly only a few of the most obvious the first is to make housing prices endogenously determined within the model in this way one could examine the role of both fiscal incentives capitalization and political incentives votes in the determination of optimal policies a second extension is to introduce explicitly the possibility of a mobile population and examine in the spirit of tiebout 1956 the effects of voting with your feet within the vote maximization framework the possibilities include both setting policies that de facto concede exit of some fraction of the current residents and or setting policies to attract new residents with particular characteristics another extension is to look at decisions over time despite widespread agreement upon the usefulness of the life cycle model of private consumption the median voter is essentially static it seems a minimal extension to include both government and private consumption in an intertemporal framework unfortunately the median voter may change over time making implementation of the median voter model problematic at best in practice intertemporal issues are important emphasizing the absence of an acceptable framework it is often suggested that elected officials will choose inappropriate intertemporal fiscal policies in response to the short run focus of the electoral process for example it appears plausible that officials will borrow in order to finance higher levels of spending and or lower taxes in the present because future residents are not present to vote against these policies the electoral process produces incorrect incentives in the same way this line of reasoning suggests that officials will undertake too little infrastructure investments because the benefits accrue to future residents one countervailing force is the effects of property capitalization to the extent that the local housing market correctly capitalizes future taxes and services into housing values current residents will be affected by inefficient policies and may use the electoral process to provide correct signals to officials there is another possibility as well to the extent that current officials recognize that inefficient current policies reduce the probability of future re election they have an incentive even in the absence of perfect capitalization to adopt intertemporally appropriate tax and spending policies intuitively the official must care about re election what if the particular individual chooses not to run for office again then to the extent that political parties or machines cause the individual to value the election of his successor i e to the extent that political legacies are important the adopted policies may satisfy the conditions for intertemporal efficiency the vote maximization approach provides a framework in which to analyze these issues lastly one could extend the model to situations in which officials care not only about election but also about the policies themselves this provides not only a different tradeoff between the tastes of the public and private sector but also a natural incentive for officials to seek re election

advertising in demand systems testing a galbraithian hypothesis in this paper we argue that the influence of advertising upon the inter product distribution of demand is a system wide phenomenon which is investigated better through a demand equation system rather than through single equation methods attention is focused upon a dynamic version of deaton muellbauer s aids model modified to include advertising terms within this framework using data on consumer s non durable expenditure in the uk we carry out a preliminary test of galbraith hypothesis that advertising may affect the composition of aggregate consumer demand

aggregation with log linear models when economic theory suggests a log linear specification for individual agents e g cobbdouglas production it is common to estimate the same log linear model with aggregate data invoking a representative agent assumption and thereby assuming away aggregation errors this paper gives necessary and sufficient restrictions on the distribution of agents in an economy for log linear agent models to aggregate into log linear macro models and discusses the aggregation bias resulting from violation of these restrictions theorems tests economic rationales and empirical results are given included are connections to random walks and to cointegration analogous results for log level models are derived

errata aggregation distribution and dynamics in the linear and quadratic expenditure systems using canadian data 1965 86 the author confirms and extends thomas m stoker s 1986 results on the rule of distributional effects in demand systems the confirmation consists of evidence from the linear expenditure system model showing that distributional effects are statistically significant and can displace ar 1 dynamics in the disturbances the extension is made to the quadratic expenditure system model and an argument is advanced that standard habit formation dynamics may reflect omitted distributional effects the evidence supports this conjecture this suggests that the author may have been drawing the wrong conclusions from expenditure studies rather than inferring dynamic behavior he should have been concluding that these models are misspecified copyright 1992 by mit press

the logic of testing structural change in meat demand a methodological analysis and appraisal in the past two decades the profession has expended valuable resources testing structural change in meat demand with mixed results overlooked to date is a fundamental methodological problem that transcends all methods of testing for structural change in this study a methodological framework is used to show that there is no valid test of structural change because of this result additional criteria from the methodology literature are used to evaluate the literature on structural change in meat demand and to provide suggestions for fertile areas of future research

forecasting with the almost ideal demand system evidence from some alternative dynamic specifications the almost ideal demand system is used as a representation of long run demands in discrete time and continuous time error correction models to produce forecasts of budget shares beyond the sample period the estimated models are subjected to a battery of tests and an analysis of the forecasts indicates that continuous time adjustment mechanisms based around fully modified estimates of the long run preference parameters provide a remarkably accurate method of forecasting budget shares

an analysis of the disaggregated manufacturing exports of the asian nies to eec usa and japan this paper examines the export performance of the four asian newly industrialized economics nies by modelling their bilateral export flows to three main oecd blocks the usa japan and the european community our estimated export demand models reveal interesting asymmetries between these three areas of destination which do not emerge from previous aggregate empirical studies of nie export performance

habit seasonality and time aggregation in consumer behaviour habitual behaviour in consumer demand analysis is generally portrayed via some form of a lagged dependent variable model the purpose of this paper is to explore the implications for habit behaviour of time aggregation this is done by specifying both habit and seasonal components in demand relations the results indicate that much of what has traditionally been identified as habitual behaviour is in fact seasonal effects

choice between disaggregate and aggregate specifications estimated by instrumental variables methods a choice criterion is proposed for discriminating between disaggregate and aggregate models estimated by the instrumental variables method the criterion based on prediction errors represents a generalization of criteria developed in the context of classical regression models the article also derives general tests for aggregation bias in the instrumental variables context the criterion and the tests are applied in an analysis of u k employment demand it is shown that a model disaggregated by 40 industries predicts aggregate employment better than an aggregate model and that significant biases exist in estimates of the long run wage and output elasticities obtained from the aggregate model

testing dynamic specification of factor demand equations for u s manufacturing this paper addresses the question of dynamic specification of empirical models of factor demand for annual u s manufacturing data from 1947 to 1981 frequently used models that treat a subset of factors as variable are shown to be misspecified an error correction model is considered as an alternative specification this model is shown to dominate several more parsimonious models in several respects however like the other models considered the error correction model is unable to generate satisfactory estimates of long run elasticities the issue of dynamic specification remains unresolved copyright 1992 by mit press

testing restrictions on a model of japanese meat demand tests for quasi separability net substitutability and perfect substitutability are developed and implemented on an almost ideal demand system model of the japanese meat sector the data set satisfies both symmetry and homogeneity there is evidence of net complimentarity between chicken and dairy beef and chicken and pork the tests indicate that japanese wagyu beef is considered a separate commodity to both imported beef and dairy beef the results also indicate that fish can be treated as separable in the japanese meat demand system

the microeconometric approach to modelling energy demand some results for uk households the paper is concerned with the empirical modeling of domestic demand for energy at the level of the individual household a model of household energy expenditures and energy using durable ownership is described estimation takes place using a pooled sample of households drawn from the repeated cross sections of the annual family expenditure survey fes price and income elasticities are found to be highly dependent on individual household characteristics type of house tenure energy using durable ownership and outside temperature finally the results are placed in a policy relevant context copyright 1991 by oxford university press

engel s law and linear in moments aggregation aggregation of individual engel curves is considered such that aggregate food demand depends on the moments of the distribution of income across individuals given that aggregate demand is the sum of individual demands consistent aggregation imposes a structure called the linear in moments form this form is used to test whether the mean and second moment of income must be used to capture aggregate food demand empirical analysis strongly supports the proposition that both the mean and variance of income are required hence our results show that aggregate food demand under consistent aggregation is inherently sensitive to changes in the distribution of income

the consumer demand for education this paper presents new evidence on the estimation of the demand for education unlike previous studies this study uses the translog les indirect utility function to analyze the demand for education within a multicommodity framework for annual u s consumption expenditures for the period 1958 82 various restrictive existing specifications of the demand for education are tested and rejected income and price elasticities of education are estimated that are larger than those of existing studies taste change has moved toward the consumption of education and the consumer has suffered from a loss in welfare due to increases in prices over time

testing restrictions in a flexible dynamic demand system an application to consumers expenditure in canada traditionally restrictions on systems of demand equations have been tested using static models whilst being estimated with time series data this paper develops a vector time series model of expenditure shares in the context of a singular dynamic demand system the model allows for non symmetric and non homogeneous short run behaviour the homogeneity and symmetry restrictions are only examined in the long run structure results based on canadian time series data are presented and reject the current practise of static modelling while restrictions suggested by economic theory are not rejected when imposed on the long run structure

non stationarity and the import demand for virgin olive oil in the european union the aim of this study is to analyse the importation of virgin olive oil to european union countries paying special attention to the spanish export contribution the method used is based on the estimation of an imports demand system the novelty of the paper lies not in the modelling approach but in the explicit consideration of the univariate characteristics of series that is included in the analysis since prices are non stationary cointegration among them has been tested results indicate that they are cointegrated and that homogeneity holds as a result relative prices are included in the imports demand system structural change is also considered so as to account for the entrance of both spain and greece into the eu during the period studied results demonstrate the leadership of spain within the eu virgin olive oil market as well as the increasing competitiveness of greek oil

age trend and cohort effects in a macro model of canadian expenditure patterns a quadratic almost ideal demand system allowing for age cohort and trend effects is developed at the macro level the model is estimated by maximum likelihood using a three tier iterative search method applied to pooled 1961 1992 time series for five regions of canada and six categories of expenditure hypothesis tests indicate support for the model specification elasticities are compared with those reported in other studies with special attention to food effects of demographic and trend variables on elasticities and expenditure shares are investigated an overall conclusion is that such effects can be very important in a macro demand system

hoarding in general equilibrium hoarding of money supply increases can explain long and variable lags from money supply changes to changes in aggregate expenditure and average prices the archibald lipsey model relies upon differences in income elasticities of demand for real money balances to explain aggregate hoarding of money supply changes consequently there is no presumption that average prices and aggregate expenditure will lag behind money supply increases this paper presents a general equilibrium model where money supply increases are partially hoarded in the short run lagged adjustment results from intertemporal substitution rather than income effects and the adjustment of aggregate expenditure and average prices is monotonic copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

ricardo s early treatment of profitability reply to hollander and prendergast i will deal first with professor hollander s objection to my reading of ricardo s letter to malthus of i i august i8i4 and with his startling claim to have readily accept ed the corn calculation in ricardo s correspondence of i8i4 i986 p iq99 the passage from the letter in question begins individuals do not estimate their profits by the material production but nations invariably do works vi p i2i in my article i984 p 737 i took this as a response to malthus s point that in no case of production is the produce exactly of the same nature as the capital advanced consequently we can never properly refer to a material rate of produce works vi p i i 7 the salient features of ricardo s reply are first that he does not mention let alone defend the assumption of capital product homogeneity which casts doubt on sraffa s interpretation works i p xxxi and secondly that he does defend the measurement of profits the net social surplus in material terms hollander complains that the passage from ricardo in fact says nothing about the profit rate or profit share i986 p 4 his emphasis this is true and instead of drawing the inference that any previous reference by ricardo to a material rate of produce was based on the representation of the profit share in physical terms i984 p 737 emphasis added i should have said simply profit or net surplus this does not make a fundamental difference to my interpretation hollander also underlines my observation that ricardo did not restrict the material estimation of profits to the agricultural sector but ricardo s argument that nations invariably estimate profit in material terms can be read as a justification for using the technique in a more unusual context specifically in the treatment of agriculture which was after all the sector to which malthus was apparently referring when he made his objection about the material rate of produce works vi pp i i 7 8 i therefore stand by my interpretation or tortuous meandering as professor hollander so colourfully describes it i986 p i093 which brings me to the readily accept ed corn calculation that hollander would put in its place until hollander i983 the textual basis for attributing the calculation was confined to ricardo s letter of 25 july i 8 i 4 works vi pp i i 4 5 leaving aside temporarily the validity of this evidence it is relevant to consider hollander s reaction s to his discovery in hollander i973 the calculation is described as a rather casual and

dynamic translog and linear logit models a factor demand analysis of interfuel substitution in us industrial energy demand abstract we compare and contrast two popular dynamic flexible functional forms for cost functions the translog and the logit j bus econ stat 8 1990 347 353 using data on us industrial energy demand from 1960 to 1992 which has been analysed by previous studies energy econ 11 1989 89 94 appl econ 21 1989 931 945 j bus econ stat 13 1995 459 465 we show the crucial role played by different dynamic formulations of the translog in this analysis of factor demands with respect to rates of dynamic adjustment and substitution possibilities we conclude that the poor performance of the dynamic translog relative to the dynamic logit cannot be explained solely by dynamic model mis specification or the inclusion of price unresponsive non energy fuel use data our most robust empirical result is that coal and oil are substitutes

the ricardo debates hollander and garegnani on natural price and output determination samuel hollander and pierangelo garegnani have debated the appropriate interpretation of david ricardo since 1973 without substantive agreement on at least one issue the interdependence of prices and output levels the debate has stalled because textual exegesis cannot solve a logical problem this paper demonstrates that such interdependence exists unless one makes one of two restrictive and un ricardian assumptions either output levels must be insensitive to wage rate changes or all industries must be subject to constant costs

identification of habit in japanese food consumption abstract demand models were estimated for five commodities using annual retail level japanese data estimates were made with the houthakker taylor houthakker h s taylor l d 1970 consumer demand in the united states analysis and projections harvard university press new york ma state adjustment model significant lags were found for meat and cereal which means that habit is important for these commodities some habit affects were also found for seafood

price and income elasticities of demand for passenger transport fuels in spain implications for public policies abstract the significant increase in passenger transport activity cars experienced by spain and its associated increase in energy consumption have several associated negative aspects including a greater dependence on foreign energy sources and higher ghg emissions therefore reducing the level of transport activity would bring important socioeconomic and environmental benefits the aim of this paper which focuses on energy consumption in the passenger transport is fourfold 1 to provide a diagnostic of energy consumption in the spanish passenger transport system and the related problems 2 to develop a model to calculate price and income elasticities of demand for transport fuel 3 to apply this model to the spanish passenger transport sector 4 to infer policy recommendations derived from the results of the diagnostic and the model it is claimed that in view of those low price elasticities and high income elasticities and if a reduction in the scale of transport activity is deemed socially desirable a combination of instruments is necessary fuel taxes play an important role within this combination apart from their long term effects the low price elasticity of demand for transport fuel would allow the collection of a significant amount of revenues which could eventually be earmarked to encourage reductions in private transport demand and modal shifts with other instruments

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models

the demand for food and beverages in norway abstract the demand for food and beverages is estimated within a three stage demand model the separability structure of the model is checked by nonparametric tests some generalized axiom of revealed preference garp violations are detected in one of the subsystems however they are removed by small adjustments in the quantities of fish and the violations are interpreted as results of measurement errors the almost ideal demand system is used in the static and a dynamic version the results of various specification and misspecification tests suggest that the static version performs poorly as compared with the dynamic version norwegian demand elasticities for disaggregate food commodities have rarely been estimated within a system framework so the results are of intrinsic interest the elasticities estimated by using the dynamic model are of the expected signs and reasonable magnitudes the values are stable over time for most commodities elasticities estimated within a subsystem are conditional on the goods included in that system and they may differ from the more policy relevant unconditional elasticities estimated within a system including all goods adjustment formulas are used to approximate the unconditional elasticities from the estimated conditional elasticities there are considerable differences between the numerical values of the conditional and unconditional elasticities for several of the foods the unconditional own price elasticities are in the interval 0 20 to 0 89 the own price elasticities for hot drinks and for milk are most inelastic the unconditional expenditure elasticities for food away from home fish soft drinks and alcoholic beverages are above one while the expenditure elasticity for hot drinks is about zero

a monthly dynamic consumer expenditure system for germany with different kinds of households a dynamic monthly consumer expenditure system is estimated for an aggregate household and three household types using recent german data the results tend to support the long run restrictions of homogeneity and symmetry for the aggregate household but only when short run dynamics are modelled following the method of anderson and blundell the required lags are short however the results for the partiallydisaggregated data are markedly different in particular the integrability restrictions can be rejected for the sample of high income workers therefore contrary to the usual presumption the less aggregated data seem more at variance with the restrictions of utility maximization

fewer fish for higher profits price response and economic incentives in global tuna fisheries management this paper evaluates industry wide economic incentives arising from changes in product prices in an industry exploiting a common renewable resource tropical tunas that is regulated via output limits changes in prices alter economic incentives by affecting revenues profits conservation and nonmarket public benefits economic incentives in industries exploiting common resources have been examined from multiple angles however industry level variation in market prices arising from changes in public regulation has not been explored we analyse the impact on economic incentives due to changes in output limits and market prices through estimation of ex vessel price and scale flexibilities for imported skipjack and yellowfin in thailand s cannery market the unitary scale flexibility estimated from the general synthetic inverse demand systems indicates no loss in revenue and even potential profit increases resulting from lower harvest levels that could arise from lower catch limits however for a revenue neutral or positive outcome to be achieved the three inter governmental tuna regional fisheries management organizations which manage the majority of the yellowfin and skipjack tuna in the pacific and indian oceans would have to coordinate multilaterally to set the catch limits for both species