Personal Consumption and Single Persons

In a recent JFE article, I presented five empirical approaches to identify the personal consumption of earnings made by single persons. I stated that forensic economic estimates of earnings minus personal consumption are relevant to, but do not define, the awardable financial support damages to survivors or estates under the various wrongful death laws in the United States. In a comment on my article, Thomas Ireland has stated that the role of forensic economic evaluation is to only estimate how much financial support single decedents would actually have provided to statutory survivors—which he states is often zero. I present several arguments and facts to show that Ireland's criticisms and concerns are unsupportable.

Personal Consumption and Single Persons: A Reply to Thomas Ireland

Krueger¹

2012

Personal Consumption by Family Type and Household Income

Krueger¹

2014

Using Consumer Expenditure Survey data, this paper presents a unified approach in estimating adult personal consumption across five family types: married wage earners living together by themselves, married wage earners living together with their minor children, married retirees living together by themselves, single wage earning parents living together with their minor children, and single wage earners living alone. In addition to advancing the literature with a unified analysis of family traits, this paper uses over 700 microdata expenditure classifications instead of the approximate 30 summary expenditure classifications which have been relied on in other personal consumption studies. Microdata expenditure classification reduces problems of allocating expenses among family members. The paper begins with an overview of the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the federal data source that is most appropriate for estimating personal consumption. Next presented are the allocation rules to separate personal from survivor and household expenditures. The data are then identified followed by empirical estimation.

Consumer Expenditures and Savings in High Income Households

Cook¹,

Oryema²,

Stephens

2018

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.