Final Report Summary - RPH (A revealed preference analysis of household consumption models)
My ERC project “A revealed preference analysis of household consumption models” had mainly methodological objectives related to modeling household consumption decisions. For doing this, I developed and applied so-called non-unitary household consumption models. These models assume that every household member has his or her own (possibly different) preferences and that the household members engage in an intrahousehold decision process to determine how the household will spend its common budget. Although it is by now well-recognized that we should properly model and understand this intrahousehold decision process, it is also the case that the literare mainly treats the household as a black box by using an unitary model to study its decisions. Such models completely ignore the impact of the intrahousehold decision process on the ultimate household decisions.
The second distinguishing feature of my project is the fact that I am using a revealed preference approach to model household decisions. More precisely, based on a series of household consumption decisions alone, I try to identify the individual preferences and the intrahousehold decisions process. Importantly, I do this without imposing any functional structure on the preferences and/or decisions process. This is in sharp contrast, with the differential or parametric literature, which always assumes, at least implicitly, some functional structure. This makes my empirical conclusions robust against functional misspecifications. Moreover, some of the publications of my ERC project have shown that revealed preference methods are especially useful for studying non-unitary models. That is, I showed that the individual preferences and the decision process can be identified on the basis of revealed preference characterizations, which is in sharp contrast with some classical non-identification results based on the more standard differential methods.
The support of the ERC starting grant resulted in 24 papers published in international, peer-reviewed journals, 8 working papers that are currently under submission, 3 book chapters and 1 book. I managed to publish five papers in the so-called top-5 journals in economics (1x Econometrica, 2x American Economic Review, 1x Journal of Political Economy, 1x Review of Economic Studies). The versatility of my research agenda is also confirmed by my other publications in journals such Theoretical Economics, Journal of Econometrics, Operations Research, AEJ Micro, Economic Journal,...
The second distinguishing feature of my project is the fact that I am using a revealed preference approach to model household decisions. More precisely, based on a series of household consumption decisions alone, I try to identify the individual preferences and the intrahousehold decisions process. Importantly, I do this without imposing any functional structure on the preferences and/or decisions process. This is in sharp contrast, with the differential or parametric literature, which always assumes, at least implicitly, some functional structure. This makes my empirical conclusions robust against functional misspecifications. Moreover, some of the publications of my ERC project have shown that revealed preference methods are especially useful for studying non-unitary models. That is, I showed that the individual preferences and the decision process can be identified on the basis of revealed preference characterizations, which is in sharp contrast with some classical non-identification results based on the more standard differential methods.
The support of the ERC starting grant resulted in 24 papers published in international, peer-reviewed journals, 8 working papers that are currently under submission, 3 book chapters and 1 book. I managed to publish five papers in the so-called top-5 journals in economics (1x Econometrica, 2x American Economic Review, 1x Journal of Political Economy, 1x Review of Economic Studies). The versatility of my research agenda is also confirmed by my other publications in journals such Theoretical Economics, Journal of Econometrics, Operations Research, AEJ Micro, Economic Journal,...