Measuring Growth in Consumer Welfare with Income-Dependent Preferences: Nonparametric Methods and Estimates for the United States
Measuring Growth in Consumer Welfare with Income-Dependent Preferences: Nonparametric Methods and Estimates for the United States
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用收入相关偏好衡量消费者福利的增长：美国的非参数方法和估计
DOI：
10.1093/qje/qjad039
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发表时间：
2024
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Jaravel X
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jaravel X
我们应该如何衡量消费者福利的变化，观察价格和支出的数据？本文提出了一个非参数的方法，任意偏好下，可能取决于可观察到的消费者的特征，例如，当支出份额随收入而变化。使用一组不变价格下的总支出作为我们的真实的消费（福利）的货币度量，我们导出了一个原则性的衡量真实的消费增长的方法，该方法具有相对于传统方法的修正项。我们表明，校正可以利用观察到的，横截面的家庭层面的价格指数和家庭特征，如收入之间的关系的算法进行非参数估计。我们证明了我们的算法在模拟的准确性。将我们的方法应用于美国的数据，我们发现修正的幅度可能很大，因为收入弹性产品的快速增长和较低的通货膨胀相结合。设定2019年的参考价格，我们发现：（i）未经校正的措施低估了1955年每户家庭的平均真实的消费，低估了11.5%;（ii）校正使1955年至2019年的年增长率降低了18个基点，这比同一时间范围内众所周知的“支出转换偏差”更大。
How should we measure changes in consumer welfare given observed data on prices and expenditures? This article proposes a nonparametric approach that holds under arbitrary preferences that may depend on observable consumer characteristics, for example, when expenditure shares vary with income. Using total expenditures under a constant set of prices as our money metric for real consumption (welfare), we derive a principled measure of real consumption growth featuring a correction term relative to conventional measures. We show that the correction can be nonparametrically estimated with an algorithm leveraging the observed, cross-sectional relationship between household-level price indices and household characteristics such as income. We demonstrate the accuracy of our algorithm in simulations. Applying our approach to data from the United States, we find that the magnitude of the correction can be large because of the combination of fast growth and lower inflation for income-elastic products. Setting reference prices in 2019, we find that (i) the uncorrected measure underestimates average real consumption per household in 1955 by 11.5%, and (ii) the correction reduces the annual growth rate from 1955 to 2019 by 18 basis points, which is larger than the well-known “expenditure-switching bias” over the same time horizon.