Abstract This study reviews the direct and indirect effects of higher energy and bread prices (due to removing their subsidies and paying their equivalent in cash instead). Therefore, all consumer goods were classified into 6 groups and a linear expenditure system was estimated based on households’ budget data of 2009 and 2011 for urban and rural areas separately. The results indicate that hi...

W herever one turns these days, one seems to run into comments about the financial condition of the American household. Most of these comments refer to sources of increasing stress on the American consumer, from the historically low household savings rate to the historically high rates of bankruptcy and debt delinquency. On top of all this, demographic trends are raising the prospect of having ...

We investigate the extent to which statistical predictive models leak information about their training data. More specifically, based on use case of household (electrical) energy consumption, we evaluate whether white-box access auto-regressive (AR) trained such data together with background information, as aggregates (e.g., monthly billing information) and publicly-available weather data, can ...

BACKGROUND China has been undergoing tremendous demographic and epidemiological transitions during the past three decades and increasing burden from non-communicable diseases and an ageing population have presented great health-care challenges for the country. Numerous studies examine catastrophic healthcare expenditures (CHE) worldwide on whole populations rather than specific vulnerable group...

We assessed the burden of cancer on households' out-of-pocket health spending, non-medical consumption, workforce participation, and debt and asset sales using data from a nationally representative health and morbidity survey in India for 2004 of nearly 74 thousand households. Propensity scores were used to match households containing a member diagnosed with cancer (i.e. cancer-affected househo...

We investigate the welfare consequences of the stark increase in wage and earnings inequality in the US over the last 30 years. Our data stems from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is the only US data set that contains information on wages, hours worked, earnings and consumption for the same cross section of US households. We first document that, while the cross-sectional variation in wag...

This agent-based model uses the building blocks of a Computable General Equilibrium model, but instead of assuming equilibrium, it explicitly models the price formation and investment processes using money as the medium of exchange. This model gives us several insights that CGE models do not: first, we can check whether or not the results of the CGE models still hold without the equilibrium ass...

Although small, rural water supplies may present elevated microbial risks to consumers in some settings, characterizing exposures through representative point-of-consumption sampling is logistically challenging. In order to evaluate the usefulness of consumer self-reported data in predicting measured water quality and risk factors for contamination, we compared matched consumer interview data w...

OBJECTIVE To assess the validity of the adapted Radimer/Cornell questionnaire to measure food insecurity in low-income urban households in Tehran, the capital of Iran. DESIGN The Radimer/Cornell questionnaire was modified and used to assess the applicability, validity and reliability of such a measure in a culturally different context of urban households in Tehran. Factor analysis and Cronbac...

OBJECTIVE To establish the feasibility and utility of a simple data collection methodology for dietary assessment. DESIGN Using a cross-sectional design, trained data collectors approached adults (approximately 20 - 40 years of age) at local grocery stores and asked whether they would volunteer their grocery receipts and answer a few questions for a small stipend (dollar 1). METHODS The gro...