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: May 28, 2009

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 sample.dta. It will output files to a subdirectory names “results/”.

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_creation.do – This program merges the price data into merged_file.dta, generates real expenditures by category, creates other variables such as demographic controls and imposes our sample restrictions. The resulting data set is saved as sample.dta.

robustness_appendix.do generates the output used in the online robustness appendix.

additional_figures.do generate the data for figures 4 and 5, which use the CSFII and ATUS, respectively. The CSFII data are contained in c_vs_e.dta. The ATUS time use data are from the 2003, 2004, and 2005 waves. These data are in the files 03_subset.dta, 04_subset.dta, and 05_subset.dta, respectively.