We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate’s long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s - 2007), and recent substantial increase (2008 - 2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious ‘buffer stock’ model of optimal...

From the perspective of balancing urban and rural development, this article researches the factors influencing the consumption level of rural residents in China. I select the relevant data concerning per capita net income of rural households and annual per capita consumer spending of rural...

I study how boundedly rational agents can learn the solution to an infinite horizon optimal consumption problem under uncertainty and liquidity constraints. I present conditions for the existence of an optimal linear consumption rule and characterize it. Additionally, I use an empirically...

Heightened uncertainty since the onset of the Great Recession has materially increased saving rates, contributing to lower consumption and GDP growth. Consistent with a model of precautionary savings in the face of uncertainty, we find for a panel of advanced economies that greater labor income...

This paper focuses on human capital and housing in Slovakia during the economic reforms of the last two decades. We compare households that entered the labour market before and after the economic reforms in 1990. On the one hand, we study the returns to education in different labour market...

In industrialized countries the rising percentage of households behaves rationally. It is represented by the life cycle hypothesis of determining their incomes. This concept was taken into account in many macroeconometric multicountry models. The W models of the Polish economy assumed the number...

In industrialized countries the rising percentage of households behaves rationally. It is represented by the life cycle hypothesis of determining their incomes. This concept was taken into account in many macroeconometric multicountry models. The W models of the Polish economy assumed the number...

This paper studies the dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under two alternative assumptions about information updating by households – rational inattention and sticky expectations. We first show that the two types of sticky information diffusion can help generate strong excess...