- A Penny Saved: Prices and the Timing of Paycheck Receipt
- Lost in translation: What do Engel curves tell us about the cost of living?
- Cash by Any Other Name? Evidence on Labeling from the UK Winter Fuel Payment
- Distributional Changes in U.S. Dietary Quality 1989-2008
- Expenditure response to increases in in-kind transfers: Evidence from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
A Penny Saved: Prices and the Timing of Paycheck Receipt
Timothy Beatty
Abstract:
This paper explores a puzzling empirical regularity: households pay less for foods as the time since receipt of their last paycheck increases. I leverage randomization with regard to paycheck timing to causally identify the effect of time since paycheck receipt on prices. Estimates of the decline in prices range between 5% and 6% percent, over the course of a month. I investigate several potential explanations for this behavior, including credit constraints and stockpiling. I find evidence that the effect is driven by low-income households and exacerbated by stockpiling behavior.
Lost in translation: What do Engel curves tell us about the cost of living?
Timothy Beatty and Thomas Crossley
Abstract:
In two influential papers, Hamilton (2001) and Costa (2001) proposed a simple, straightforward and intuitively appealing method to estimate bias in the CPI as a cost-of-living index. In this paper, we show that while the Hamilton/Costa approach and the CPI each capture changes in the cost-of-living for a representative household, they are unlikely to capture changes in the cost of living for the same household. Thus the Hamilton/Costa approach conflates CPI bias with measuring the cost-of-living at different points of the expenditure distribution.
Cash by Any Other Name? Evidence on Labeling from the UK Winter Fuel Payment
Timothy Beatty, Laura Blow, Thomas Crossley and Cormac O'Dea.
Abstract:
Standard economic theory implies that the labelling of cash transfers or cash-equivalents (e.g. child benefits, food stamps) should have no effect on spending patterns. The empirical literature to date does not contradict this proposition. We study the UK Winter Fuel Payment (WFP), a cash transfer to older households. Exploiting sharp eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design, we find robust evidence of a behavioural effect of the labelling. On average households spend 41% of the WFP on fuel. If the payment was treated as cash, we would expect households to spend approximately 3% of the payment on fuel.
Distributional Changes in U.S. Dietary Quality 1989-2008
Timothy Beatty, Biing-Hwan Lin, and Travis Smith
Abstract:
This paper uses stochastic dominance to measure changes in the distribution of overall dietary quality in the U.S. over the period 1989{2008. Diet quality is often used as as a proxy for wellbeing and an outcome variable for a wide variety of interventions. For the population as a whole, we find significant improvements in diets across all levels of dietary quality. Further, we find improvements for both low-income and higher-income individuals alike. We show that the improvements vary between these groups with regards to the timing and distributional location. Further, we find that over half of the improvement for all individuals can be explained by changes in food formulation and changes in demographics.
Expenditure response to increases in in-kind transfers: Evidence from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
Timothy Beatty and Charlotte Tuttle
Abstract:
Recent studies on food stamp participant households' marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps versus income have had contradictory results: experimental studies have found household behavior aligns with standard economic theory where households' marginal propensity to spend on food out of food stamps is equivalent to cash income; observational studies find that households have a larger marginal propensity to spend out of food stamps than cash income. In this study, we re{examine this question by estimating how an unprecedentedly large increase in food stamp benefits due to the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act affects food-at-home expenditure. We find that the policy change caused households to increase food-at-home expenditure as well as increase households' share of total expenditure allocated toward food-at-home expenditure. We compare these results to a time period without a meaningful food stamp policy change and find our results are unique to the ARRA implementation time period.