One of the basic motives for saving is the accumulation of wealth to insure future welfare. Both introspection and … extant research on consumption insurance find that people face substantial risks that they do not fairly pool. In theory, the … consumption and wealth accumulation of price-taking households in an economy with incomplete markets differs substantially from …

We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of …

transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX … repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to decompose idiosyncratic changes in income into predictable life … evolution of consumption and income inequality well and delivers two main results. First, we find that permanent changes in …

This paper investigates the causes of the Italian consumption bust of the early 1990s by estimating deviations from … 'normal' consumption using household level data for 1985-94. The data set used is a particularly rich, but as yet unexplored … households each year. The main findings are that the decline in consumption was larger for the working age households. The fall …

cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality, including wages, labor earnings, income, consumption, and wealth. After … distribution. Consumption inequality increased less than disposable income inequality, and tracked the latter much more closely at …

payments (e.g. tax rebates) are spent on non-durable household consumption in the quarter that they are received. We develop a … Finances. A version of the model parametrized to the 2001 tax rebate episode is able to generate consumption responses to …

one-half the current level. Such dramatic demographic change could have a powerful impact upon saving behaviour in both … United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. How governments respond to shifts in saving and in the burden of state pensions is …

precautionary saving motive in a two-period model with Kreps-Porteus preferences. For small risks, we derive a measure of the … strength of the precautionary saving motive, which generalizes the concept of ‘prudence’ introduced by Kimball (1990b). For … large risks, we show that decreasing absolute risk aversion guarantees that the precautionary saving motive is stronger than …