Krishna Pendakur

Simon Fraser University

Lewbel and Pendakur (2021) propose a model of consumption inefficiency in collective households, based on “cooperation factors". We simplify that model to make it empirically tractable, and apply it to identify and estimate household member resource shares, and to measure the dollar cost of inefficient levels of cooperation. Using data from Banglad...

Despite a recent and dramatic re-evaluation of the health consequences of alcohol consumption, very little is known about the effects of in utero exposure to alcohol on long-run outcomes such as later-life mortality. Here, we investigate how state by year variation in alcohol control arising from the repeal of federal prohibition affects mortality...

Lewbel and Pendakur (2021) propose a model of consumption inefficiency in collective households, based on “cooperation factors”. We simplify that model to make it empirically tractable, and apply it to identify and estimate household member resource shares, and to measure the dollar cost of inefficient levels of cooperation. Using data from Banglad...

Objective Examine time trends in suicidal ideation in post-secondary students over the first three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada and identify subpopulations of students with increased risk. Method We analysed 14 months of data collected through repeated cross-sectional deployment of the World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Healt...

We construct a peer effects model where mean expenditures of consumers in one's peer group affect utility through perceived consumption needs. We provide a novel method for obtaining identification in social interactions models like ours, using ordinary survey data, where very few members of each peer group are observed. We implement the model usin...

We propose a model of consumption inefficiency in collective households. Inefficiency depends on a ‘cooperation factor’, which can also affect both the allocation of resources within a household and the utility of household members. Households are conditionally efficient, conditioning on the value of the cooperation factor. This lets us exploit con...

We provide new results showing identification of a large class of fixed-T panel models, where the response variable is an unknown, weakly monotone, time-varying transformation of a latent linear index of fixed effects, regressors, and an error term drawn from an unknown stationary distribution. Our results identify the transformation, the coefficie...

BACKGROUND The World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health-International College Student (WMH-ICS) initiative aims to screen for mental health and substance use problems among post-secondary students on a global scale as well as to develop and evaluate evidence-based preventive and ameliorative interventions for this population. The epidemi...

Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) World Mental Health-International College Student (WMH-ICS) initiative aims to screen for mental health and substance use problems among post-secondary students on a global scale as well as to develop and evaluate evidence-based preventive and ameliorative interventions for this population. This prot...

We assess how the July 2016 increase in the Canada Child Benefit (CCB) affected household spending with respect to total current expenditure and its seven constituent categories: clothing, food, health care, household operations, recreation, shelter, and transportation. The increase in the CCB was large: for most recipient households, it increased...

Antecedentes: A medida que las comunidades se preparan para oleadas futuras de la pandemia del COVID-19 se necesitan pruebas sobre su impacto en la salud mental de sub-poblaciones específicas, como es el caso de los estudiantes universitarios. Objetivos: Estudiar la asociación de la proximidad del COVID-19 con síntomas de ansiedad y depresión en es...

In Canada, self-government agreements, comprehensive land claims agreements, and opt-in arrangements allow Indigenous groups to govern their internal affairs and assume greater responsibility and control over the decision-making that affects their communities. We use difference-in-difference models to measure the impact of such agreements on averag...

Traditional per capita measures of poverty assign the same poverty status to individuals living in the same household and overlook differences in living standards within households. There has been a long-standing need for a tool that enables poverty measurement at the individual level, while avoiding overly complex estimation techniques and, if pos...

Background Evidence about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of specific subpopulations, such as university students, is needed as communities prepare for future waves. Aims To study the association of proximity of COVID-19 with symptoms of anxiety and depression in university students. Method This trend study analysed weekl...

Using new data on county-level variation in alcohol prohibition from 1933 to 1939, we investigate whether the repeal of federal prohibition increased infant mortality, both in counties and states that repealed and in neighboring counties. We find that repeal is associated with a 4.0% increase in infant mortality rates in counties that chose wet sta...

We provide a new full-commitment intertemporal collective household model to estimate resource shares, defined as the fraction of household expenditure enjoyed by household members. Our model implies nonlinear time-varying household quantity demand functions that depend on fixed effects. We provide new econometric results showing identification of...

Resource shares, defined as the fraction of total household spending going to each person in a household, are important for assessing individual material well-being, inequality and poverty. They are difficult to identify because consumption is measured typically at the household level, and many goods are jointly consumed, so that individual level c...

Background Disorders affecting mental health are highly prevalent, can be disabling, and are associated with substantial premature mortality. Yet national health system responses are frequently under-resourced, inefficient, and ineffective, leading to an imbalance between disease burden and health expenditures. We estimated the disease burden in th...

We use data from the Canadian Censuses (1991–2006) and National Household Survey (2011) to examine how household incomes vary across Aboriginal communities with and without modern agreements. These agreements include self-government, comprehensive land claims and opt-in legislation regarding financial and land management authority. Using a differen...

en Inequality and poverty estimation (indeed, all welfare analysis) must deal with the fact that people are heterogeneous. Equivalence scales and indifference scales are tools that may be used for this. An equivalence scale gives the relative costs faced by different people; an indifference scale gives the relative cost of living for people in diff...

We prove a new identification theorem showing nonparametric identification of the joint distribution of random coefficients in general nonlinear and additive models. This differs from existing random coefficients models by not imposing a linear index structure for the regressors. We then model unobserved preference heterogeneity in consumer demand...

Using Canadian Census microdata from 1990 to 2005, we investigate the earnings attainment of immigrants to Canada in 6 age-at-arrival cohorts. In comparison to past work we extend our understanding regarding three dimensions of the age at immigration debate: we explore heterogeneity across fine grained age-at-arrival cohorts, over a fifteen-year pe...

We assess the evolution of consumption inequality in Canada over the years 1997 to 2009. We correct the imputation of shelter consumption for homeowners to allow for unobserved differences in housing quality correlated with selection into rental tenure, and we account for measurement error in this imputation. Using the annual Survey of Household Sp...

In immigrant-receiving countries, immigrants are often concentrated in residential neighbourhoods with high concentrations of immigrants. In addition, they are concentrated in workplaces with high concentrations of immigrants. Many researchers have assumed that these are two sides of the same coin, so that policy affecting residential segregation c...

Measures of household consumption-­which may be used to investigate average consumption growth, mor consumption poverty and inequality-­must account for the rental flow from owned accommodation. We consider two econometric problems relating to the imputation of rental flows for owned accommodation that have been thus far ignored in the literature o...

In this paper, we present the estimates of the fiscal transfer to immigrants from native-born Canadians. The fiscal transfer is the amount of money that immigrants absorb in public services less the amount that they pay in taxes, suitably adjusted for scale effects in public provision of services, life cycle effects in tax payment, and so on. Our w...

We consider a revealed preference‐based method that will bound the minimal partition of consumer microdata into a set of preference types such that the data are perfectly rationalisable by standard utility theory. This provides a simple, non‐parametric and theory‐driven way of investigating unobserved preference heterogeneity in empirical data, and...

Collective household models posit that each household member has access to a fraction of the household budget, called a resource share, which defines the shadow budget faced by a household member. Together with the within-household shadow price vector, the shadow budget determines the material well-being of the household member. In general, it is d...

We propose a generalization of random coefficients models, in which the regression model is an unknown function of a vector of regressors, each of which is multiplied by an unobserved error. We also investigate a more restrictive model which is additive (or additive with interactions) in unknown functions of each regressor multiplied by its error....

We investigate the pattern of earnings disparity across Canadian-born ethnic groups in Canada over three census years, 1996, 2001, and 2006. This extends “Colour My World” by 10years (Pendakur and Pendakur 2002). We find that the earnings gaps faced by Canadian-born visible minorities have not eroded since the 1990s. This is somewhat surprising giv...

Investigating the earnings and income disparity faced by Aboriginal people in Canada from 1995 to 2005, we find that Aboriginal people face substantial income and earnings gaps in comparison with Canadian-born majority-group workers with similar characteristics (such as age and education). The estimated gaps are large: about 10 to 20 percent for wo...

A semiparametric model of consumer demand is considered. In the model, the indirect utility function is specified as a partially linear, where utility is nonparametric in expenditure and parametric (with fixed- or varying-coefficients) in prices. Because the starting point is a model of indirect utility, rationality restrictions like homogeneity an...

Abstract If preferences or budgets are heterogeneous across people (as they clearly are), then individual cost- of-living indices are also heterogeneous. Thus, any social cost-of-living index faces an aggregation problem. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem which we call a ’common-scaling’social cost-of-living index (CS-SCOLI). In...

The share of household resources devoted to children is hard to identify, because consumption is measured at the household level, and goods can be shared. Using semiparametric restrictions on individual preferences within a collective model, we identify how total household resources are divided up among household members, by observing how each fami...

Microdata concerning consumer demand typically show considerable variation in real expenditures, but very little variation in prices. We propose a semiparametric strategy for the consumer demand problem in which expenditure share equations are estimated nonparametrically in the real expenditure direction and estimated parametrically (with fixed or...

In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...

Maximization of utility implies that consumer demand systems have a Slutsky matrix which is everywhere symmetric. However, previous non- and semi-parametric approaches to the estimation of consumer demand systems do not give estimators that are restricted to satisfy this condition, nor do they offer powerful tests of this restriction. We use nonpar...

Lewbel and Pendakur (2009) developed the idea of implicit Marshallian demands. Implicit Marshallian demand systems allow the incorporation of both unobserved preference heterogeneity and complex Engel curves into consumer demand analysis, circumventing the standard problems associated with combining rationality with either unobserved heterogeneity...

We invent Implicit Marshallian demands, which combine desirable features of Hicksian and Marshallian demands. We propose and estimate the Exact Affine Stone Index (EASI) implicit Marshallian demand system. Like the Almost Ideal Demand (AID) system, EASI budget shares are linear in parameters given real expenditures. However, unlike the AID, EASI de...

The structural consumer demand methods used to estimate the parameters of collective household models are typically either very restrictive and easy to implement or very general and difficult to estimate. In this paper, we provide a middle ground. We adapt the very general framework of [Browning, M., Chiappori, P.A., Lewbel, A., 2004. Estimating Co...

We investigate whether immigrant and minority workers' poor access to high-wage jobs---that is, glass ceilings---is attributable to poor access to jobs in high-wage firms, a phenomenon we call glass doors. Our analysis uses linked employer-employee data to measure mean- and quantile-wage differentials of immigrants and ethnic minorities, both withi...

The existence of glass ceilings and sticky floors suggests that disadvantaged workers will be under-represented in some parts of the income distribution, and over-represented in others. We present a representation index that measures the prevalence of population subgroups in different regions of the income (or any other) distribution. Our represent...

The existence of glass ceilings and sticky floors suggests that disadvantaged workers will be under-represented in some parts of the income distribution, and over-represented in others. We present a new index to measure the representation of population subgroups in different regions of the income distribution. Our representation index is easily gen...

An equivalence scale is a measure of the cost of living of a household of a given size and demographic composition, relative to the cost of living of a reference household (usually a single adult), when both households attain the same level of utility or standard of living. Equivalence scales are difficult to construct because household utility can...

[eng] Transportation costs and monopoly location in presence of regional disparities. . This article aims at analysing the impact of the level of transportation costs on the location choice of a monopolist. We consider two asymmetric regions. The heterogeneity of space lies in both regional incomes and population sizes: the first region is endowed...

We use quantile regression methods on 2001 Census of Canada data to assess disparity at four points in the conditional distribution of earnings of native-born ethnic minorities (the 20th, 50th, 80th and 90th percentiles) as well as at the mean. In doing so, we examine and assess the degree to which minorities face earnings differentials at both the...

We invent Implicit Marshallian Demands, a new type of demand function that combines desirable features of Hicksian and Marshallian demand functions. We propose and estimate the Exact Af Stone Index (EASI) Implicit Marshallian Demand system. Like the Almost Ideal Demand (AID) system, EASI budget shares are linear in parameters given real expendi-tur...

Recent research on glass ceilings and sticky floors has focused on the magnitude of differences between groups in the upper and lower quantile cutoffs of the conditional wage distribution. However, quantile cutoffs for different groups are only weakly informative of representation. For example, if the top decile cutoff is lower for minority than ma...

We present a new class of social cost-of-living indices and a nonparametric framework for estimating these and other social cost-of-living indices. Common social cost-of-living indices can be understood as aggregator functions of approximations of individual cost-of-living indices. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the expenditure-weighted average...

We examine how no-fault divorce law affects the age at first marriage, when everyone has a different value of marriage. The heterogeneity of individual values implies an unambiguous negative effect on the variance of marriage age. We test this hypothesis with marriage records from 1970 to 1995. Controlling for state-level heterogeneity and for time...

In this study, we estimate earnings differentials for knowledge of thirteen minority languages in Canada's three largest urban area. We find that conditional on knowledge of a majority language, knowledge of a minority language is associated with lower earnings. However, the negative differential diminishes for those languages with large local popu...

Abstract Some household expenditures, such as those for subsistence or basic needs, are fixed. Using the methodology of equivalence scales, we develop a model in which differences in fixed costs of characteristics across households can be identified from household behaviour. Equivalent expenditure for a household is the expenditure needed to bring...

This note is to correct an error in Donaldson and Pendakur (2004) in this Journal. In bEquivalent-expenditure functions and expenditure-dependent equivalence scalesQ ,w e propose equivalence scales which are log-linear in expenditure and show that they are identifiable from behaviour under the maintained assumption of log-linearity. In the empirica...

Pashardes (1991) and Banks et al. (1994) use parametric methods to estimate lifetime equivalence scales. Their approaches put parametric restrictions on the differences in within-period expenditure needs across household types, the intertemporal allocation of expenditure, and the shapes of commodity demand equations. This paper puts parametric stru...

This paper presents and investigates a new class of equivalent-expenditure functions that is a generalization of the one that corresponds to exact (independent-of-base) equivalence scales. It provides less restrictive household demands, especially for children’s goods, and has associated equivalence scales that may depend on expenditure. We show th...

There are three key objectives of these lectures: First, to provide a powerful test of integrability conditions on individual household data without the need for para-metric models of consumer behavior. Second, to provide tight bounds on welfare costs of relative price and tax changes. Third, to provide tight bounds on demand responses. The aim is...

Other chapters in this volume have investigated inequality in earnings and household income. In this chapter we make the case that measures of consumption inequality are useful in addition to, or possibly instead of, measures of income inequality. We then outline the steps that are necessary to measure consumption inequality

In this study, we estimate earnings differentials for knowledge of thirteen minority languages in Canada's three largest urban areas. We find that conditional on knowledge of a majority language, knowledge of a minority language is associated with lower earnings. However, the negative differential diminishes for those languages with large local pop...

Using the census main bases from 1971 through 1996, we estimate earnings equations for Canadian-born female and male workers to assess the size of white­Aboriginal and white­visible minority earnings differentials in Canada. These databases allow us to focus on the small populations of Canadian-born visible minority and Aboriginal workers in Canada...

this paper, we argue that socializing is important to our well being, and is therefore an important economic activity, and that it is tightly linked to a set of familiar economic choices that economists usually regard as purely private. This link, of course, means that these choices are not private. Our model of the link that connects socializing t...

In this paper, I estimate the poverty rate as the proportion of individuals who have consumption - rather than income - lower than an absolute poverty line. The absolute poverty line used is based on the expenditure necessary to achieve a minimum level of material well-being. It does not change over time with changing social values as do relative p...

We argue that socializing is an important economic activity because it is vital to our well being, and that an important input into the activity of socializing is the set of experiences that is shared by the participants. Clearly, a person's experiences are generated, in part, by standard economic choices, and therefore the set of shared experience...

This paper presents and investigates two classes of equivalent-income functions that are generalizations of those that correspond to exact (independent-of-base) absolute and relative equivalence scales. They provide less restrictive household demands, especially for children's goods, and have associated absolute and relative equivalence scales that...

In the measurement of inequality, adjustments for differences across households in their demographic composition and in the price regimes they face are usually very simple. Often, nominal expenditure (or income) is adjusted with an expenditure-independent price deflator and a price-independent equivalence scale. I show that using more flexible expe...

We estimate earnings differentials for knowledge of 13 minority languages in Canada's three largest urban areas. We find that conditional on knowledge of a majority language, knowledge of a minority language is associated with lower earnings. However, the negative differential diminishes for those languages with large local populations. This sugges...

Previous papers estimate base-independent equivalence scales and test base-independence using strict parametric assumptions on Engel curves and equivalence scale functions. These parametric tests reject the hypothesis of base independence. I construct a semiparametric estimator of a household equivalence scale under the assumption of base independe...

The literature on ethnically based earnings differentials in Canada has focused on differences either between whites and visible minorities or between particular ethnic groups. In this paper, the authors examine both earnings differentials between whites and visible minorities, and earnings differentials within the white and visible-minority groupi...

This paper uses Canadian cross-sectional income and expenditure data to examine changes in the distribution of family income and family consumption during the period 1978 to 1992. Family consumption data are analyzed because in the presence of intertemporal consumption smoothing, the cross-sectional distribution of consumption may characterize the...

This paper considers the implementation of semiparametric methods in the empirical analysis of consumer demand. The application is to the estimation of the Engel curve relationship and uses the British Family Expenditure Survey. Household composition is modelled using an extended partially linear framework. This is shown to provide a useful method...

This paper presents the asymptotic distributions of the S-Gini and E-Gini relative and absolute indices of inequality. The generalized Gini indices are defined in terms of Lorenz ordinates and results on the asymptotic covariance matrix of Lorenz ordinates are used to derive the large sample properties of the indices. The methods are illustrated by...

We use quantile regression methods to assess disparity in the conditional distribution of earnings of ethnic minorities. Whereas most researchers (eg, Albrecht et al 2003) conceptualize glass ceilings only at the top of the conditional distribution of earnings, we argue that in the context of imperfect real-world data, such disparity could appear a...

We examine the consequences of ethnic identity on getting a job. We define ethnic identity as the attachment to the group who shares one's ancestral heritage, and use a direct measure of the depth of ethnic identity based on a survey question which asks "is your ethnic origin very important to you, somewhat important, not very important or not at a...

An equivalence scale is a measure of the cost of living of a household of a given size and demographic composition, relative to the cost of living of a reference house- hold (usually a single adult), when both households attain the same level of utility or standard of living. Equivalence scales are difcult to construct because household utility can...

Consumer demand systems must everywhere satisfy homogeneity and have a Slutsky ma-trix which everywhere satisfies symmetry if they are to be used for welfare analysis. However, previous non-and semi-parametric approaches to the estimation of consumer demand sys-tems do not give estimates restricted to satisfy these conditions, nor do they offer pow...

This note is to correct an error in Donaldson and Pendakur (2004) in this Journal. In "Equivalent-expenditure functions and expenditure-dependent equiv- alence scales", we propose equivalence scales which are log-linear in expenditure and show that they are identi…able from behaviour under the maintained assump- tion of log-linearity. In the empiri...

Socializing is an important economic activity. A critical input into the activity of socializing is the set of experiences— especially cultural experiences— that is shared by participants. Our model of this link provides an explanation of a number of interesting mass culture phenomena, including certain sorts of conformity, the domination of one cu...

Children's resources matter, but they are hard to identify because consumption is typically mea- sured at the household level. Modern collective household models permit some identication of house- hold member resources, but these models typically either ignore children, or treat them as attributes of adults. We propose a collective household model...

We characterize the wages of immigrants and visible minorities in Canada. Since high-wage jobs are concentrated in high-wage …rms, we investigate whether adverse wage outcomes are driven by poor access to jobs in high-wage …rms (glass doors), or poor access to high-wage jobs within …rms (glass ceilings). To assess these possi-bilities, we use linke...

University Microfilms order no. 9504953. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 1994. Includes bibliographical references.