There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. This paper exploits liquid … and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors …, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of consumption and household debt to income in South Africa, from 1971 to 2005. The …

) than the estimates associated with below-average periods. Results are robust to alternative estimation strategies to model …

Consumption Expenditure Survey (CEX) to estimate individual-level impulse responses as well as multipliers for government spending … tend to decrease consumption inequality, whereas tax policy shocks most negatively affect the lives of the poor, more so … than the rich, thus increasing consumption inequality. …

The consumption Euler equation is a building block of modern macro theory. Yet, the existing evidence on aggregate data … state of the economy. The nonlinear method reveals that during periods in which consumption is above its conditional average … value) than the estimates associated with periods of below-average consumption. Our evidence is consistent with models of …

policy shocks on aggregate consumption and for the impact on inflation that other models have hard a time explaining. In …