An analysis of consumer panel data

In terms of collecting comprehensive panel expenditure data, there are trade-offs to be made in terms of the demands imposed on respondents and the level of detail and spending coverage collected. Existing comprehensive spending data tends to be cross-sectional whilst panel studies include only limited expenditure questions that record spending only as broad aggregates. More recently, economists have begun to use spending information collected by market research companies that records very detailed spending down to the barcode level from a panel of households, usually recorded by in-home barcode scanners, which may provide considerable advantages over existing data more commonly used in social sciences. However, there has not been a comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of data collection method and the potential implications of survey mode on the recorded data. This paper seeks to address this, by an in-depth examination of scanner data from one company, Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), on grocery purchases over a five-year period. We assess how far the ongoing demands of participation inherent in this kind of survey lead to 'fatigue' in respondents' recording of their spending and compare the demographic representativeness of the data to the well-established Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS), constructing weights for the TNS that account for observed demographic differences. We also look at demographic transitions, comparing the panel aspect of the TNS to the British Household Panel Study (BHPS). We examine in detail the expenditure data in the TNS and EFS surveys and discuss the implications of this method of data collection for survey attrition. Broadly, we suggest that problems of fatigue and attrition may not be so severe as may be expected, though there are some differences in expenditure levels (and to some extent patterns of spending) that cannot be attributed to demographic or time differences in the two surveys alone and may be suggestive of survey mode effects. Demographic transitions appear to occur less frequently than we might expect which may limit the usefulness of the panel aspect of the data for some applications.Household panel data, scanner data, expenditure, food, duration models, attrition

Parental income and children's smoking behaviour: evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

Does money matter? When investigating health behaviour, research often finds a strong positive association between income and healthy behaviour. This could however be due to individual characteristics that determine both income and health investment and is not necessarily due to the role of money per se. In this study we look at this relationship over the generations by studying the association between parental income and children's prevalence to smoke in Britain using data from the British Household Panel Survey and British Youth Survey. We find an inverse relation between parental income and children's smoking prevalence, but when looking at within household changes by comparing sibling's smoking status differences at the same age, we find instead a positive effect. This indicates that within household increases in income lead to an increased probability of smoking of a younger child.Child smoking, Parental income, Panel Data

Welfare Rankings From Multivariate Data, A Non-Parametric Approach

Economic and Social Welfare is inherently multidimensional. However choosing a measure which combines several indicators is difficult and may have unintended and undesireable effects on the incentives for policymakers. We develope a nonparametric empirical method for deriving welfare rankings based on data envelopment which avoids the need to specify a weighting scheme. The results are valid for all possible social welfare functions which share certain cannonical properties. We apply this method to data on human development.Welfare Rankings, Data Envelopment, Human development

How might in-home scanner technology be used in budget surveys?

This paper considers what role in-home barcode scanner data could play in collecting household expenditure information as part of national budget surveys. One role is as a source of validation. We make detailed micro-level comparisons of food and drink expenditures in two British datasets: the Living Costs and Food Survey (the main budget survey) and Kantar Worldpanel scanner data. We find that levels of spending are significantly lower in scanner data. A large part (but not all) of the gap is explained by weeks in which no spending at all is recorded in scanner data. Demographic differences between the surveys accentuate rather than close the gap. We also demonstrate that patterns of expenditure across the surveys are much more similar, as are Engel curves relating food commodity budget shares to total food expenditures. A key finding is that the period over which we observe households in the scanner data significantly alters the distribution, but not the average, of weekly food expenditures and budget shares, which has important implications for whether two-week spending diaries common to budget surveys are giving a truly accurate reflection of a household's typical spending patterns. A second, more involved use of scanner data would be to impute detailed commodity-level expenditure patterns given only information on total expenditures, as a way of reducing respondent burden in budget surveys. We find that observable demographics in the scanner data explain little of the variation in store-specific expenditure patterns, and so caution against relying too heavily on imputation.Scanner data; expenditure; inflation; food; measurement.

Booms and busts: consumption, house prices and expectations

Over much of the past 25 years, the cycles of house price and consumption growth have been closely synchronised. Three main hypotheses for this co-movement have been proposed in the literature. First, that an increase in house prices raises households' wealth, particularly for those in a position to trade down the housing ladder, which increases their desired level of expenditure. Second, that house price growth increases the collateral available to homeowners, reducing credit constraints and thereby facilitating higher consumption. And third, that house prices and consumption have tended to be influenced by common factors. This paper finds that the relationship between house prices and consumption is stronger for younger than older households, which appears to contradict the wealth channel. These findings therefore suggest that common causality has been the most important factor behind the link between house price and consumption.House prices, consumption booms, wealth effects, collateral effects, common causality

Environmental Taxes

This chapter provides an overview of key economic issues in the use of taxation as an instrument of environmental policy in the UK. It first reviews economic arguments for using taxes and other market mechanisms in environmental policy, discusses the choice of tax base, and considers the value of the revenue from environmental taxes. It is argued that environmental tax revenues do not significantly alter economic constraints on tax policy, and that environmental taxes need to be justified primarily by the cost-effective achievement of environmental goals. The chapter then assesses key areas where environmental taxes appear to have significant potential -- including taxes on energy used by industry and households, road transport, aviation, and waste. In some of these areas, efficient environmental tax design needs to make use of a number of taxes in combination -- a "multi-part instrument".

Timing and Quantity of Consumer Purchases and the Consumer Price Index

A common approach to measuring price changes is to look at the change of the expenditure needed to purchase a fixed basket of goods. It is well-known that this approach suffers from problems and creates several biases in the measurement of price changes faced by consumers. Substitution and outlet bias, two commonly studied concerns, are both driven by consumer choices of what and where to buy. However, consumers also make other choices, including how much and when to buy. We discuss the implications of consumers' timing and quantity decisions have on standard practices of computing of computing a price index. We use household-level data on quantities purchased and prices paid to construct a measure of the savings made by consumers' optimizing behaviour in the purchase of food. In particular, we compare the prices actually paid by the consumers to various alternatives that do not allow for substitution. Our analysis suggests that the average consumer makes significant, and comparable in magnitude, savings from the four dimensions of choice that we study. Furthermore, our data suggests significant heterogeneity in consumer behavior, and that this behavior is correlated with demographics. Our findings suggest that ignoring timing and quantity decisions, when computing a price index, can generate biases on the order of magnitude of substitution and outlet biases.

Three horizons:A pathways practice for transformation

Global environmental change requires responses that involve marked or qualitative changes in individuals, institutions, societies, and cultures. Yet, while there has been considerable effort to develop theory about such processes, there has been limited research on practices for facilitating transformative change. We present a novel pathways approach called Three Horizons that helps participants work with complex and intractable problems and uncertain futures. The approach is important for helping groups work with uncertainty while also generating agency in ways not always addressed by existing futures approaches. We explain how the approach uses a simple framework for structured and guided dialogue around different patterns of change by using examples. We then discuss some of the key characteristics of the practice that facilitators and participants have found to be useful. This includes (1) providing a simple structure for working with complexity, (2) helping develop future consciousness (an awareness of the future potential in the present moment), (3) helping distinguish between incremental and transformative change, (4) making explicit the processes of power and patterns of renewal, (5) enabling the exploration of how to manage transitions, and (6) providing a framework for dialogue among actors with different mindsets. The complementarity of Three Horizons to other approaches (e.g., scenario planning, dilemma thinking) is then discussed. Overall, we highlight that there is a need for much greater attention to researching practices of transformation in ways that bridge different kinds of knowledge, including episteme and phronesis. Achieving this will itself require changes to contemporary systems of knowledge production. The practice of Three Horizons could be a useful way to explore how such transformations in knowledge production and use could be achieved