Deconstructing Lifecycle Expenditure:

Data Sets and Programs

This is the data page for “Deconstructing Lifecycle Expenditure,” by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst. All datasets and programs are in Stata format.

Last updated: March 10, 2008

The text of the paper can be found here.

The robustness appendix can be found here.

A zip file containing all datasets and programs can be found here.

The contents of the zip file are:

tables_and_figures.do –This program generates the output used to create all tables and figures in the paper. It uses the data from use_sample.dta.

use_sample.dta – This is our primary data set. It is constructed using the following three files:

merged_file.dta – This is our base dataset, constructed by merging the various files of the Consumer Expenditure Survey extract compiled by Ed Harris and John Sabelhaus and provided by the NBER (http://www.nber.org/data/ces_cbo.html).

prices.dta – This file contains our deflators. Most product-level deflators are from the CPI series. If no appropriate series was available from the CPI, we used the relevant PCE deflator from the national income accounts.

sample_restrictions.do – This program merges the price data into merged_file.dta, generates real expenditures by category, creates other variables such as cohort identifiers and educational attainment, and restricts the sample to household heads from our eleven cohorts. The resulting data set is saved as use_sample.dta.