Working Paper

Necessary and sufficient conditions for latent separability

Authors

Ian Crawford

Published Date

1 February 2004

Type

Working Paper (CWP02/04)

This paper extends the nonparametric methods developed by Samuelson (1948), Houthakker (1950), Afriat (1973), Diewert (1973) and Varian (1982, 1983) to latently separable models. It presents necessary and sufficient empirical conditions under which data on the market behaviour of a price-taking consumer, and a hypothesised allocation across latent groups are nonparametrically consistentwith latent separability (Gorman (1968, 1978), Blundell and Robin (2000)). It considers homothetic latent separability and weak separability as special cases.