Personal Consumption by Husbands and Wives

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In wrongful death damages, personal consumption dollars represent the portion of total household expenditures that are exclusive to the decedent. Most of the personal consumption estimates in the forensic economic literature are computed from Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published tables of Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) data. Those tables delineate, by household size and income, the average total dollars spent on approximately 20 summary expenditure groupings.1 Ireland and Depperschmidt (1999) presented a compilation of personal consumption articles that rely on such CEX summary table data with recent like-articles being written by Ajwa, Martin and Vavoulis (2000) and Ruble, Patton, and Nelson (2004). Trout and Foster (1993) and Scoggins (2001) both used the CEX Interview microdata to compute personal consumption estimates specific to husbands and wives. Unfortunately, those two studies ignored the Diary part of the CEX which includes significant household expenditures relevant to personal consumption and they continued to use the BLS’s summary group tabulations of each household’s expenditures. This paper uses CEX microdata to provide new personal consumption estimates for husbands and wives by their work status and by the number of children living in the home. Instead of relying on summary expenditures, all 700 micro-expenditure items within the CEX Interview and Diary surveys are incorporated into the analysis. Like Trout and Foster and Scoggins, the expenditure data is specific to husbands and wives, but this study goes further by using all of the CEX Interview and Diary microdata instead of just summary Interview data. Husband and wife specific data, by work status and number of children living at home, are important delineations in reliably computing personal consumption applicable to the loss of wage earnings of a married person. Assume the case of a wrongful death of a working married male living only with his wife. If a traditional two-person household personal consumption table were used to offset the husband’s earnings loss, such an analysis would mix the expenditure data of working and retired husbands and wives along with mixing in the data of households consisting of two single persons or one single person living with a child, etc. Another problem with studies based on summary tables is that total expenditures are usually shown to exceed income at the lower income levels. That result is not necessarily a fault of the CEX, but its presenta-