Individual Consumption within the Household: A Study of Expenditures on Clothing

Individual Consumption Within the Household: A Study of Expenditures on Clothing While most studies of consumption expenditures focus on the household as the purchasing unit, it would be useful for many purposes to know how households spread purchases among family members. Studies of intergenerational or sex equity within the household require data of this sort. Information on intrahousehold patterns may be helpful in formulating policy prescriptions, for example, in setting fair levels of child support payments. Examination of demands using the individual as the unit of analysis could reveal factors that aggregation at the household level hides, improving projection of future demand patterns. This study focuses on the distribution of expenditures on clothing among household members for two reasons. First, on a conceptual level, clothing purchases are "allocatable." That is, because households generally purchase clothing items with a specific individual beneficiary in mind, household purchases can be seen as the sum of purchases for the individual members. This property does not extend to certain other household purchases, such as expenditures on housing. Second, on a practical level, clothing is one of only two items (educational expenses being the other) for which respondents to the U.S. Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey give information about allocation. While the clothing data from this survey are currently released for public use only in grouped form (e.g., clothing expenditures for girls ages 2 to 15), the individual-level data internal to the Bureau of Labor Statistics provide a unique opportunity for direct observation of intrahousehold allocation. Most studies of intrahousehold allocation, for lack of just such data or out of ambition to "allocate" all expenditures (including those of a "public" or "family" nature), have been forced to impute expenditures on individuals. Usually this is done by making comparisons across households of various sizes and compositions, looking at the effect of the "marginal" person or persons on household expenditures. Recent works in this vein include Deaton and Muellbauer (1986), Gronau (1987), and Deaton (1987). Espenshade (1973) and Edwards (1981) were among those interested in the allocation of particular goods, including clothing. The theoretical justification and empirical plausibility of the results of these imputation methodologies are far from established (Deaton and Muellbauer 1986; Nelson 1986a and 1986b). This study of clothing expenditures may provide a means of "benchmarking" the empirical results of such studies. While many studies of expenditures on clothing at the household level exist (Norton and Park 1987), there have been few direct studies at the individual level. An early study of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on expenditures by wage and clerical earners in 1934-1936 (Williams and Hanson 1941) compiled statistics on average clothing expenditures by sex and sixteen age classes. Erickson conducted the most recent study of expenditures on individuals using national survey data from the 1960-1961 CE Survey (Erickson 1968; United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics 1967). Very small-scale studies of clothing consumption by individuals, such as that conducted by the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station in 1965 (Britton 1969) provide interesting detail but may not be generalizable to other populations. The purpose of the present study is to examine the influences on annual clothing expenditures for individual children and adults in two-parent households in the United States. Two-parent-only households were chosen for analysis to provide some degree of homogeneity in the sample and because they have been the focus of much previous empirical work and many policy questions. Unlike the earlier Williams and Hanson (1941) and Erickson (1968) studies of consumption by individuals that used tabular analysis, this study uses multivariate regression analysis to identify the important factors. …