At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w19544.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

We show that there is substantial heterogeneity in women's labor supply elasticities at the micro level and highlight the implications for aggregate behavior. We consider both intertemporal and intratemporal choices, and identify intensive and extensive responses in a consistent life‐cycle framework, using US CEX data. Heterogeneity is due to observables, such as age, wealth, hours worked, and the wage level, as well as to unobservable tastes for leisure: the median Marshallian elasticity for hours worked is 0.18, with corresponding Hicksian elasticity of 0.54 and Frisch elasticity of 0.87. At the 90th percentile, these values are 0.79, 1.16, and 1.92. Responses at the extensive margin explain about 54% of the total labor supply response for women under 30, although this declines with age. Aggregate elasticities are higher in recessions, and increase with the length of the recession. The heterogeneity at the micro level means that the aggregate labor supply elasticity is not a structural parameter: any aggregate elasticity will depend on the demographic structure of the economy as well as the distribution of wealth and the particular point in the business cycle.

We estimate labour supply elasticities at the micro level and show what we can learn from possibly very heterogeneous elasticities for aggregate behaviour. We consider both intertemporal and intratemporal choices, and identify intensive and extensive responses in a consistent lifecycle framework, using US CEX data. There is substantial heterogeneity in how individuals respond to wage changes at all margins, both due to observables, such as age, wealth, hours worked and the wage level as well as to unobservable tastes for leisure. We estimate the distribution of Marshallian elasticities for hours worked to have a median value of 0.18, and corresponding Hicksian elasticities of 0.54 and Frisch elasticities of 0.87. At the 90th percentile, these values are 0.79, 1.16, and 1.92. Responses at the extensive margin are important, explaining about 54% of the total labour supply response for women under 30, although this importance declines with age. We show that aggregate elasticities are cyclical, being larger in recessions and particularly so in long recessions. This heterogeneity at the micro level means that the aggregate labour supply elasticity is not a structural parameter: any aggregate elasticity will depend on the demographic structure of the economy as well as the distribution of wealth and the particular point in the business cycle.

Anti-smoking policies can in theory make smokers better off, by helping smokers with time-inconsistent preferences commit to giving up or reducing the amount they smoke. We use almost 20 years of British individual-level panel data to explore the impact on self-reported psychological well-being of two policy interventions: large increases in tobacco excise taxes and bans on smoking in public places. We use a difference-in-differences approach to compare the effects on well-being for likely smokers and non-smokers. We find robust evidence that increases in tobacco taxes raise the relative well-being of likely smokers. Exploiting regional variation in the timing of the smoking ban across Britain, we find no evidence that it raised smoker well-being. Our * Submitted August 2014. Anti-smoking policies and smoker well-being 225 findings give some support to the view that tobacco taxes are at least partly justifiable because of the benefits they have for smokers themselves. Policy pointsr Theories of time-inconsistent behaviour imply that smokers with selfcontrol problems may benefit from policies that increase the cost of smoking. This is because such measures can help smokers achieve their goals of cutting down or quitting.r We find evidence in a British panel covering the years 1991-2008 that the subjective well-being of likely smokers increases more than that of people less likely to smoke when tobacco taxes increase. While the sizes of the estimated effects are modest, they are indicative of self-control problems among smokers. We do not find similar effects for a smoking ban.r These results suggest an additional justification for tobacco taxation: such taxes correct not only for costs that smokers impose on others but also for costs that smokers with self-control problems impose on themselves.r If poorer smokers suffered from greater self-control problems, then it would suggest that the costs and benefits of tobacco taxation are more progressive than a standard analysis would suggest. However, we do not find evidence that smokers with low education (and hence lower lifetime income) suffer from greater self-control problems.

The spread of COVID-19 has led to sweeping changes in the way households work, spend their time and shop, resulting in different shopping patterns and rapid price changes in some goods. How will changes such as these be reflected in headline inflation measures such as the Consumer Prices Index (CPI)? This paper discusses problems in interpreting the CPI as a measure of how the cost of living is changing during the lockdown.The spread of COVID-19 has led to sweeping changes in the way households work, spend their time and shop. This has led to large changes in spending patterns and, in some cases, rapid price changes. Web-scraped data collected *