How reliable is the Family Expenditure Survey? Trends in incomes and expenditures over time

Banks, James; Johnson, Paul

doi:10.1920/re.ifs.1998.0057

Cited by 25 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…For most other items, including housing, we used data from the national Family Expenditure Surveys (FES)4 5 1994/5 and 1995/6 on the actual expenditure of households of never-married working men aged 18–30. Our figures are based on the third of such households with the lowest income per person.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A minimum income for healthy living

Morris

Donkin²,

Wonderling³

et al. 2000

Journal of Epidemiology &Amp; Community Health

124

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Background-Half a century of research has provided consensual evidence of major personal requisites of adult health in nutrition, physical activity and psychosocial relations. Their minimal money costs, together with those of a home and other basic necessities, indicate disposable income that is now essential for health. Interpretation-Accumulating science means that absolute standards of living, "poverty", minimal oYcial incomes and the like, can now be assessed by objective measurement of the personal capacity to meet the costs of major requisites of healthy living. A realistic assessment of these costs is presented as an impetus to public discussion. It is a historical role of public health as social medicine to lead in public advocacy of such a national agenda. (J Epidemiol Community Health 2000;54:885-889) This study was triggered by the innovation in the UK of a statutory minimum wage. During intensive preliminary discussion of it there was virtually no reference to health needs that such an income should be capable of meeting. We seek to rectify this as a contribution to public health. Methods-InHalf a century of research has provided consensual evidence of major requisites of adult health, and lower disease and death rates, particularly in nutrition, physical activity and psychosocial relations. These, together with standard attitudes to what otherwise is decent and necessary, can now be recognised as an objective basis for personal health. As yet, however, society has adapted little to this modern knowledge.We have assessed minimal costs in the UK of such healthy living, selecting single young men, a relatively defined group, to establish the principle and to ease our initial foray into what we foresaw would be a diYcult field; and also because they are a national priority of concern.As will be illustrated, a huge volume of research at population and individual levels has been coalescing on conditions of health and wellbeing, on physiological status, risk factors and the prevention of disease, on morbidity and mortality. Equally remarkable, is the consensus of recommendations on lifestyles for the population at large that is flowing for the first time and with increasing consistency and confidence from this modern knowledge, and the specific guidance that, indeed, is now often given by government itself.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A minimum income for healthy living

Morris

Donkin²,

Wonderling³

et al. 2000

Journal of Epidemiology &Amp; Community Health

124

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For this reason, our preferred set of estimates are those in panel A. Values of g just above unity are not inconsistent with the estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution obtained from the FES data on different sample periods by At-tanasio and Weber (1993) and Blundell, Browning, and Meghir (1994), among others.…”

mentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Nondurable expenditures are averaged over the two-week period, aggregated to the household level, and then divided by an equivalence scale (to take account of the composition of the household) and deseasonalized for use in our analysis. A detailed analysis of FES income and spending data over time shows that, for nondurable items in particular, the FES captures a large and constant proportion of household expenditures as measured from other sources of aggregate information (see Banks and Johnson [1998] for further details of these results as well as a detailed description of the FES sample).…”

Section: Appendix a The Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Asset holding and consumption volatility

Attanasio

Banks

Tanner

1998

Working Paper Series

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We investigate the possibility that limited participation in asset markets, and the stock market in particular, might explain the lack of correspondence between the sample moments of the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution and asset returns in U.K. data. We estimate ownership probabilities to separate "likely" shareholders from nonshareholders, enabling us to control for changing composition effects as well as selection into the group. We then construct estimates This study has been financed under the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Fiscal Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. We are also grateful for funding from the European Union under the Training and Mobility of Researchers scheme, contract ERBFMRXCT960016. Material from the Family Expenditure Survey made available by the Office for National Statistics through the Economic and Social Research Council data archive has been used by permission of the controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. Neither the ONS nor the ESRC data archive bears any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the data reported here. Thanks are due to Richard Blundell, Lucy Chennells, Lars Hansen, Costas Meghir, Annette VissingJørgensen, Guglielmo Weber, and Frank Windmeijer for useful comments and discussions. We also received useful feedback from the participants at the February 1997 TMR meeting on savings and pensions, the summer 1997 NBER workshop on consumption, and the 1997 Econometric Society European meetings and at seminars at Bristol University, Oxford University, the Inter American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Institut National de las Statistique et de Etudes Economiques, the International Institute at the University of Stockholm, and the University of Warwick. The usual disclaimer applies. 772journal of political economy of the IMRS for each of these different groups and consider their time-series properties. We find that the consumption growth of shareholders is more volatile than that of nonshareholders and more highly correlated with excess returns to shares. In particular, one cannot reject the predictions of the consumption capital asset pricing model for the group of households predicted to own both assets. This is in contrast to the failure of the model when estimated on data for all households.

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“…Because interviews are performed every month, households interviewed in different months report information on different periods. For exam-12 A recent study edited by Banks and Johnson (1997) compares expenditure and income data in the FES with those of the national accounts. It finds that-controlling for differences in definitions (especially of housing services), reference population, and sampling structure-the FES data track very well their counterparts in the national accounts.…”

Section: A Data Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intertemporal Choice and the Cross-Sectional Variance of Marginal Utility

Attanasio

Jappelli

2001

Review of Economics and Statistics

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Abstract-The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the crosssectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide an explicit test of this hypothesis. Our approach circumvents the necessity to identify a pure age profile of the crosssectional variance of consumption and yields a well-specified statistical test. This test is applied to data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. The results are remarkably consistent with the restrictions implied by the theory of intertemporal consumption choices.

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How reliable is the Family Expenditure Survey? Trends in incomes and expenditures over time

Cited by 25 publications

References 8 publications

A minimum income for healthy living

A minimum income for healthy living

Asset holding and consumption volatility

Intertemporal Choice and the Cross-Sectional Variance of Marginal Utility

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