Why are households that report the lowest incomes so well-off?

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

October 15, 2017

Summary:

We document that households in the UK with extremely low measured income tend to spend much more than those with merely moderately low income. This phenomenon is evident throughout three decades worth of microdata and across different employment states, levels of education and marital statuses. Of the likely explanations, we provide several arguments that discount over-reporting of expenditure and argue that under-reporting of income plays the major role. In particular, by using a dynamic model of consumption and saving, and paying special attention to poverty dynamics, we show that consumption smoothing cannot explain all the apparent dissaving.

Published in

Economic Journal

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 127 , p.24 -49

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12334

ISSN

130133

Subjects

Notes

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Open Access

© 2017 The Authors. The Economic Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Economic Society.

#523503

---

Related Publications

• Why are households that report the lowest incomes so well-off?

  1. Mike Brewer
  2. Ben Etheridge
  3. Cormac O'Dea

  Research Paper
  April 12, 2013