Efforts to reduce energy use and environmental damage in China require an understanding of the rapidly rising demand for energy. Household use of fuels, electricity and gasoline has changed dramatically in response to rising incomes, changing prices and changing demographics. We estimate income and price elasticities for these energy types using a two-stage budgeting method, applying the AIDS m...

We estimate within-year price elasticities of demand for detailed health care services using an instrumental variable strategy, in which individual monthly cost shares are instrumented by employer-year-plan-month average cost shares. A specification using backward myopic prices gives more plausible and stable results than using forward myopic prices. Using 171 million person-months spanning 73 ...

In this paper we assess the relationship between the aggregate income elasticity of aggregate demand and individual income elasticities of demand. We show that the aggregate elasticity is equal to the mean of individual elasticities plus a covariance term. Consequently, the sign of this covariance term determines whether the aggregate elasticity overestimates or underestimates the mean of indiv...

Import demand elasticities are regularly used to compute trade restrictiveness indices, transform estimated effects of policies into ad-valorem equivalents, or judge on the prohibitive ...

The relative costs of trading different goods vary independently of the relative costs of producing them. The costs of trade are also often high. As a result, producer price elasticities of demand in economies that trade are usually much lower than purchaser price elasticities. Trade costs could thus explain why cross-country variation in the composition of output is much less sensitive to vari...

We develop a model of household demand for frequently purchased consumer goods that are branded, storable and subject to stochastic price fluctuations. Our framework accounts for how inventories and expectations of future prices affect current period purchase decisions. We estimate our model using scanner data for the ketchup category. Our results indicate that price expectations and the nature...