The distribution of consumption-expenditure budget shares: Evidence from Italian households

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This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget shares distributions (HBSDs) defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We find that HBSDs are fairly stable over time for each specific category, but profoundly heterogeneous across commodity categories. We then derive a parametric density that is able to satisfactorily characterize HBSDs and: (i) is consistent with the observed statistical properties of the underlying levels of household consumption-expenditure distributions; (ii) can accommodate the observed acrosscategory heterogeneity in HBSDs. Finally, we taxonomize commodity categories according to the estimated parameters of the proposed density. We show that the resulting classification is consistent with the traditional economic scheme that labels commodities as necessary, luxury or inferior.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Papers on Economics and Evolution ; No. 0809

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis ; Hypothesis Testing: General
• Subject: Household Consumption Expenditure ; Budget Shares ; Sum of Log-Normal Distributions

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Barigozzi, Matteo ; Alessi, Lucia ; Capasso, Marco ; Fagiolo, Giorgio
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Max Planck Institute of Economics
• (where): Jena
• (when): 2008

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/32659
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:41 AM CET