Publication

In this paper the authors demonstrate that theoretically validating the role of a representative consumer would require that the way individuals benefit from intra-household sharing be strictly aligned across the rich and the poor: once expenditures for subsistence needs are subtracted from disposable household income, household-size economies the remainder (discretionary) household incomes entail must be the same across the rich and the poor. To that end, the authors have designed a survey method that allows the testing of this stringent property of intra-household sharing and find that it holds.