consumption across states of nature, one must also consider the assets' effects on households' ability to smooth consumption over … returns correlate negatively with income shocks) even though the assets offer identical opportunities to smooth consumption … be substantial (above 1% of certainty-equivalent consumption), the assets we consider can only mitigate a relatively …

We assess the degree of consumption smoothing implicit in a calibrated life-cycle version of the standard incomplete … the model have access to less consumption-smoothing against permanent earnings shocks than what is measured in the data …. BPP estimate that 36% of permanent shocks are insurable (i.e., do not translate into consumption growth), whereas the …

productivity, to study the efficient degree of consumption inequality in the long run. In our environment a utilitarian planner … allows for consumption inequality even when labor productivity is public information. We show that adding private information … does not alter this result. We also show that the informationally constrained optimal insurance contract has a resetting …

of consumption insurance against shocks to male and female wages, as estimated empirically by Blundell, Pistaferri and … consumption, compared to the empirical estimates of 32% and 19%. Most of the consumption insurance against permanent male wage …-household income insurance mechanism strongly biases upward the welfare losses from idiosyncratic wage risk as well as the desired …

religious organization are able to insure their consumption stream against income shocks and find strong insurance effects for …This paper examines whether involvement with religious organizations insures an individual's stream of consumption and … services are able to insure their stream of happiness against income shocks and find strong happiness insurance effects for …

We document some key facts about aggregate consumption and its subcomponents over time. We then document the behavior … of some important determinants of consumption, such as consumers' expectations about their future income, and changes in … consumption during the Great Recession can be explained by the observed drops in wealth and income expectations …

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 …

decade, pre-dating the 2009 stimulus. Second, despite a large economic literature on the topic, the state of theory and … evidence is not as "shovel ready" as one would like. Although consumption and investment clearly respond to tax incentives and …

from the Current Population Survey and consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new evidence on the … poverty, examining alternative income poverty and consumption poverty, which have conceptual and empirical advantages as … measures of the well-being of the poor. We find that both income and consumption poverty are sensitive to macroeconomic …

We show that volatility movements have first-order implications for consumption dynamics and asset prices. Volatility …