Providing a valuable resource for government economists, academics, and research libraries, this volume contains twelve papers by Robert Pollak--four previously unpublished--that explore the theory of the cost of living index. In addition to Pollak's classic paper, "The Theory of the Cost of Living Index," the volume includes papers on subindexes, the intertemporal cost of living index, welfare comparisons and equivalence scales, the social cost of living index, the treatment of "quality," and consumer durables in the cost of living index.

This book explores the principal issues involved in bridging the gap between the pure theory of consumer behavior and its empirical implementation. The theoretical starting point is the familiar static, one-period, utility maximizing model in which the consumer allocates a fixed budget among competing categories of goods. The authors focus upon four issues of primary importance in empirical demand analysis: the structure of preferences, the treatment of demographic variables, treatment of dynamics, and the specification of the stochastic structure of the demand system.