期刊名称：Euro Area Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Statistics
印刷版ISSN：1830-3420
电子版ISSN：1830-3439
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
出版社：European Central Bank
摘要：This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditure budget share distributions —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 household budget share distributions 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 household budget share distributions 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 household budget share distributions. 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.
关键词：Household Consumption Expenditure; Budget Shares; Sum of Log-Normal;Distributions.
