Almost half of American families did not adjust their consumption following receipt of the 2001 or 2008 tax rebates. Another 20%, with low income and more likely to rent, spent a small but significant amount. Households with large spending propensity held high mortgage debt. The heterogeneity is...

Data revisions and the availability of a longer sample offer the opportunity to reconsider the empirical findings that suggest that in the OECD countries national saving responds non-monotonically to fiscal policy. The paper confirms that the circumstance most likely to give rise to a...

Several recent studies imply that the response of national saving to fiscal policy is non-monotonic. In this paper, we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-monotonic responses arise: one refers to a sample of OECD countries, as in previous studies, and one to a...

This paper estimates the heterogeneous responses to the 2001 income tax rebates across endogenously determined groups of American households. Around 45% of the sample saved the entire value of the rebate. Another 20%, with low income and liquid wealth, spent a significant amount. The largest...

This paper proposes a theoretical explanation of the empirical finding that private consumption increases in response to an increase in government spending. The explanation requires two ingredients. First, labor demand expands (e.g. prices are sticky). Second, general non-separable preferences...

Using a long span of expenditure survey data and a new narrative measure of exogenous income tax changes for the United Kingdom, we show that households with mortgage debt exhibit large and persistent consumption responses to tax changes. Home-owners without a mortgage, in contrast, do not...

This paper shows that multiple growth paths may occur in a politico-economic model of endogenous growth. This multiplicity is characterized by the coexistence of a low-tax, low-capital-flight equilibrium and a high-tax, high-capital-flight equilibrium. The likelihood of multiplicity is crucially...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

This paper studies stylized empirical facts regarding the effects of unexpected changes in aggregate macroeconomic fiscal policies on consumers that are allowed to differ depending on their individual characteristics. We use data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate...

The wealthy hand-to-mouth are households who hold little or no liquid wealth (cash, checking, and savings accounts), despite owning sizable amounts of illiquid assets (assets that carry a transaction cost, such as housing or retirement accounts). We use survey data on household portfolios for...