Survey measures of preference parameters provide a means for accounting for otherwise unobserved heterogeneity.This paper presents measures of relative risk tolerance based on responses to survey questions about hypothetical gambles over lifetime income.It discusses how to impute estimates of...

Balance-sheet repair drove the response of a significant fraction of households to fiscal stimulus following the Great Recession. By combining survey, behavioral, and time-series evidence on the 2011 payroll tax cut and its expiration in 2013, this papers identifies and analyzes households who...

Recent fiscal policies, including the 2008 stimulus payments and the 2009 Making Work Pay tax credit, aimed to increase household spending. This paper quantifies the spending response to these policies and examines differences in spending by whether the stimulus was delivered as a one-time...

Only about one-fifth of respondents in the Reuters/University of Michigan survey report that the 2008 tax rebates led them to mostly increase spending, while over half said it would lead them to mostly pay off debt. Of those in the mostly-spend category, the response was swift, with over 80...

Labor supply is unresponsive to permanent changes in wage rates. Thus, income and substitution effects cancel, but are they both close to zero or both large? This paper develops a theory of labor supply where income and substitution effects cancel, taking into account optimization over time,...

Individuals' preferences underlying most economic behavior are likely to display substantial heterogeneity. This paper reports on direct measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These experimental measures are based on survey...

This paper develops an overlapping generations model of optimal rebalancing where agents differ in age and risk tolerance. Equilibrium rebalancing is driven by a leverage effect that influences levered and unlevered agents in opposite directions, an aggregate risk tolerance effect that depends...

Access to timely information on consumer spending is important to economic policymakers. The Census Bureau's monthly retail trade survey is a primary source for monitoring consumer spending nationally, but it is not well suited to study localized or short-lived economic shocks. Moreover, lags in...

This paper constructs a dynamic macroeconomic model with less- than-perfect price flexibility which has a real side consistent with Real Business Cycle Theory, augmented by investment adjustment costs, increasing returns to scale, and a new, flexible formalization of imperfect competition. A new...

This paper introduces the concept of standard risk aversion. A von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function has standard risk aversion if any risk makes a small reduction in wealth more painful (in the sense of an increased reduction in expected utility) also makes any undesirable, independent risk...