Robust and reliable measures of consumer expenditures are essential for analyzing aggregate economic activity and for measuring differences in household circumstances. Many countries, including the United States, are embarking on ambitious projects to redesign surveys of consumer expenditures,...

Using a standard, realistically calibrated model of buffer-stock saving with transitory and permanent income shocks, we study how cross-country differences in the wealth distribution and household income dynamics affect the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory shocks (MPC). Across...

Economists have long emphasized the importance of expectations in determining macroeconomic outcomes. Yet there has been almost no recent effort to model actual empirical expectations data; instead, macroeconomists usually simply assume that expectations are "rational." This paper shows that...