Household Income Change by Age
Hello,
I will be conducting a household income change impact study. The default IMPLAN grouping is by household income. Can I change this to age? For example, if I wanted to look at household income change for 60-70 year olds instead of household income totals is this possible? I imagine the spending patterns for a family of four vary quite a bit compared to spending patterns of a retired couple.
Thanks in advance for any help.
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Thank you for your post! Unfortunately, IMPLAN will not be able to provide you with the level of detail that you are looking for with Age. You are correct though, the spending of a family of 4 would be very different with the spending of a retired couple. If you know the average income of those who are from 60-70, or want to classify them into a single income group you could use data like that provided by the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey http://www.bls.gov/cex/2013/combined/age.pdf and bridge the age related expenditures to a Household Spending Pattern or create your own. Please note though that this would require a substantial amount of leg work for the bridging, including the caveat that the CES does not Margin the retail expenditures so you would need to do this manually for the highest level of integrity to your spending pattern or roll all the retail purchases into their appropriate retail Sectors which would come at great cost the spending pattern detail and accuracy. If you would like to give it a try let us know and we can provide you a table of Margins by which you can manually Margin the various purchases in the CES for your spending pattern. Other expenditures like taxes and savings that are classified here aren't modeled in IMPLAN, and we can help you navigate some of this as well if you want to take a project like this on. Thanks!
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