Consumer Expenditures and Savings in High Income Households

Abstract

A review of the existing academic literature as well as available government publications reveals a lack of information regarding expenditure behavior of high income households. In this paper, we combine multiple years of Consumer Expenditure Survey Public Use Microdata provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and compute average expenditures and standard errors. We apply the same methodology used by the BLS to estimate the average expenditures by household income and household size for households with income of $70,000 and higher. The resultant tables provide details on consumption and saving patterns for higher income groups that are unavailable in the tables published by the BLS. Our tables can be utilized by forensic economists in practice for the determination of consumption and savings values in wrongful death matters in high income households.