Estimating Engel curves under unit and item nonresponse

This paper estimates food Engel curves using data from the first wave of the Survey on Health, Agingand Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Our statistical model simultaneously takes into account selectivitydue to unit and item nonresponse, endogeneity problems, and issues related to flexible specification ofthe relationship of interest. We estimate both parametric and semiparametric specifications of the model.The parametric specification assumes that the unobservables in the model follow a multivariate Gaussiandistribution, while the semiparametric specification avoids distributional assumptions about the unobservables.