Topic: Economies of Scale to Consumption in Collective Households

Lecturer: Professor, Authur Lewbel, Boston College

Time: 15:30-16:30 p.m. November 2nd, 2023

Venue: B321 Zhixin Building, Central Campus

Abstract: Goods consumed by household members are often categorized as either private (consumed by individuals, like food) or public (consumed jointly by all members, like heat). Reality is that many goods are not private or public, but are shareable-different amounts are publicly and privately consumed by different members. For example, gasoline is jointly consumed in a family car trip, but privately consumed when a person drives alone. Household economies of scale requires observing or estimating how much each good is shared in each type of household. Instead of assuming every good is either public or private, BCL (Browning, Chiappori, and Lewbel 2013) allows each good to be shareable to an unknown extent, which must be estimated. Our contribution in this paper is starting from BCL, we provide a simple, linear least squares estimator of the economies of scale to consumption in collective household models with any number of shareable goods.