Using schooling decisions to estimate the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption
利用墨西哥农村有条件现金转移项目Progresa的随机实验数据，通过就学决策估计出消费边际效用弹性为1.6，为理解发展中国家家庭消费行为提供了新方法。
This paper uses schooling decisions to estimate curvature in utility of consumption in developing countries. We show that the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption (EMUC) can be recovered from three sufficient statistics: (1) the price effect of schooling; (2) the income effect of schooling; and (3) the consumption cost of sending a child to school. We estimate the consumption cost of schooling using variation from the randomized roll-out of Progresa, a conditional cash transfer program in rural Mexico. Using estimates of income and price effects in the Progresa setting from Bergstrom and Dodds (2021), we estimate the EMUC at 1.6.