Consumption Expenditures in Economic Impact Studies: An Application to University Students

Kristinn Hermannsson, Peter McGregor and John Swales ()

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: We raise the issue of how appropriately to attribute economic impact to consumption expenditures. Despite the salience of the topic for applied economics it has not received much explicit attention in recent literature. In Input-Output analysis consumption expenditures are either treated as wholly endogenous or wholly exogenous. For many applications, such as those focusing on the impacts of tourism, benefits systems or student expenditures, these binomial assumptions are not satisfactory. Therefore practical necessity has resulted in conventions ('rules of thumb') for dealing with such cases. We argue that consumption is neither wholly endogenous nor wholly exogenous but that the degree of this distinction is rather an empirical matter. To deal with this issue we set out a general model for the treatment of consumption expenditures. We illustrate its application through the case of university students in Scotland and determine the exogeneity of their expenditures drawing on survey evidence. Students are a particularly useful example as we can analyse the difference in impacts between individual student groups and how the impacts of students at particular institutions are influenced by the composition of the student body. Furthermore we take into account the binding budget constraint of public expenditures (as is the case for devolved regions in the UK) and examine how this affects the impact attributed to students' consumption expenditures.

Keywords: Input-Output; Impact; Higher Education; Students; Expenditures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I25 R12 R15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa13/ERSA2013_paper_00724.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumption Expenditures in Economic Impact Studies: An Application to University Students (2013)
Working Paper: Consumption expenditures in economic impact studies: an application to university students (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa13p724

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association Welthandelsplatz 1, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gunther Maier ().