Using a survey of households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel and the randomized timing of disbursement of the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payments, we find that a household's spending rose by ten percent the week it received a Payment and remained high cumulating to 1.5-3.8 percent of spending over...

Households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel were surveyed about their 2008 Economic Stimulus Payment. In estimates identified by the randomized timing of disbursement, the average household's spending rose by ten percent the week it received a Payment and remained high cumulating to 1.5–3.8...

Using a survey of households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel and the randomized timing of disbursement of the 2008 Economic Stimulus Payments, we find that a household's spending rose by ten percent the week it received a Payment and remained high cumulating to 1.5-3.8 percent of spending over...

Following the textbook C-CAPM, the consumption risk of an asset is typically measured as the contemporaneous covariance of the marginal utility of consumption and the return on that asset. When measured this way, consumption risk is too small to explain the observed equity premium, is negatively...

This paper evaluates theoretical explanations for the propensity of households to increase spending in response to the arrival of predictable, lump-sum payments, using households in the Nielsen Consumer Panel who received 25 million in randomly-distributed stimulus payments. The pattern of...

This chapter describes a system, called the LEADS system, for providing market participants, regulators, and households with information on the reallocation of resources within, from, and to the household sector in response to macroeconomic events. The household sector is both a propagator of...

We do not have a good measure of the effects of fiscal policy in a recession because the methods that we use to estimate the effects of fiscal policy -- both those using the observed outcomes following different policies in aggregate data and those studying counterfactuals in fitted model...

During the past two decades, the personal saving rate in the United States has fallen from eight percent to below zero. This paper demonstrates that this change represents a major shift in the allocation of newly produced goods. The share of GDP that households consume rose by 6 percentage...