Three essays on consumer behavior in the Soviet Union

The dissertation consists of three essays on the applications of western economic theories to the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union. In the three essays, the behavior of households which are subject to external factors in their decision making processes is analyzed. Unconventional Soviet specific-factors such as quantity constraints, privilege, and underground participation are the external factors which households are facing.;In the first essay, an empirical examination of retirees' wealth-age behavior is conducted. Examination of the wealth-age profile shows that wealth decumulation occurs during the retirement period for respondents in the sample. The endowment of wealth on the eve of retirement depends upon conventional socioeconomic factors and unconventional Soviet-specific factors.;The second essay utilizes a utility function approach to construct a system of household demand equations for transaction balances, leisure, rationed and unrationed goods. In particular, the aim of this section has been to investigate the marginal utility of income for households that are subject to the quantity constraint. Through utility maximization, the households' demands have been derived. Then by applying the duality technique, the effects of changes in income on households utility has been examined. The conclusion is that the marginal utility of income for quantity constrained households could be positive or negative.;The third essay empirically examines the determinants of the demand for money and liquid assets for Soviet households. The results show that gross per capita income is the major determinant of the demand for both broad money and liquid assets. The inclusion of conventional socioeconomic and unconventional Soviet-specific factors significantly raises the point income elasticity estimate.;In the empirical part of this dissertation, microeconomic data on wealth, age, money, liquid assets, and conventional socioeconomic variables and unconventional Soviet specific-factors from Soviet Interview Project Survey (SIP) is used. The SIP data is a survey of 2793 former Soviet citizens who left the Soviet Union during the late 1970's and early 1980's.