Dr. Lester Taylor, Dept. of Economics, University of Arizona has been invited to give a presentation on Tuesday, May 7th.

Posted on Friday, May 03, 2019

The title of his presentation is "A Different Way of Calculating Complete Arrays of Price Elasticites of Demand".  It will be held in Room 101 MCLN, 2:00-3:30 pm.  Abstract:  The purpose of the present seminar is to demonstrate how a framework developed from data embodied in surveys of households’ consumer expenditures can be used to calculate, in the absence of direct information, complete arrays of own- and cross-price elasticities. The engine for the analysis, whose construction is described in detail in Taylor (2013) and Taylor (2016),1 is a matrix of “intra-budget” coefficients that represent the direct relationships amongst the different categories of expenditure in households’ budgets. In the present exercise, the elements of this matrix, for 14 exhaustive categories of households’ consumption expenditure, are constructed from the information in 28 quarters of data (2006 through 2012) from the ongoing BLS Survey of Consumer Expenditure conducted by the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The procedure is illustrated for simulated changes of ±10% in the price of food and for ±20% in the price of transportation.