Household expenditure surveys are used to examine the effects of the Mexican peso crisis on household consumption. The main smoothing mechanism was a change in the composition of consumption, with households reducing semidurable spending to maintain basic food levels. This article provides a method for disentangling income, price, demographic, and crisis adjustment effects and finds that households increased their expenditure share on certain basic food items even more than Engel’s law and relative price changes would predict. I hypothesize that this reflects the use of semidurables as an adjustment mechanism and show that this leads to changes in the shape and position of the Engel curves. However, the article cannot fully rule out the alternative explanation that the reduction in semidurables reflects households reducing semidurable stocks due to a perceived fall in permanent income from the crisis.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Contact details of provider: Postal: The University of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005 Chicago, IL 60637 Fax: (773) 753-0811 Email: Web page: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/EDCC/home.html
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? Each page is provided with a technical contact, in case something is not right with the supplied information. See under "publisher info".