difference between the rich and the rest of the population: portfolios of the rich are heavily skewed toward risky assets …, particularly investments in their own privately held businesses. The paper explores three possible explanations of these facts … reflects the utility of anticipated bequests), implying that risk aversion declines as wealth rises. The paper concludes that …

successfully uncover structural parameters like the coefficient of relative risk aversion from the dataset of simulated consumers … Euler equation. The paper concludes that empirical estimation of consumption Euler equations should not be abandoned, and … discusses some alternative empirical strategies that are not subject to the problems of Euler equation estimation …

shocks, the optimal marginal propensity to consume out of permanent shocks (the MPCP) is strictly less than 1, because buffer …The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income … stock savers have a target wealth-to-permanent-income ratio; a positive shock to permanent income moves the ratio below its …

leading up to 2007, the sharp increase during the Great Recession, and much of the intervening business cycle variation. In … supply explains the trend decline in saving, while fluctuations in wealth and consumer-survey-measured unemployment … expectations capture much of the business-cycle variation, including the sharp rise during the Great Recession …

differences in immigrants' saving behavior by country of origin, those differences do not match up with the differences in … attempt to test that hypothesis by using data from the US Census to examine whether immigrants to the US from high …

Consumer approaches to the analysis of saving behavior. And they call for increased emphasis on liquidity constraints and short …This paper argues that the versions of both permanent income and life-cycle theories which have recently become … fashionable are inconsistent with the grossest features of cross-country and cross-section data on consumption and income. There …

several empirical puzzles, ranging from the level and cyclical variability of the equity premium (Abel (1990 …,1999); Constantinides (1990); Jermann (1998); Campbell and Cochrane (1999)) to the excess smoothness' of aggregate consumption (Fuhrer (2000 … puzzles imply an immediate marginal propensity to consume out of permanent shocks of much less than one. When the model is …

operations. The idea is applicable to many microeconomic and macroeconomic problems, including life cycle, buffer-stock, and …

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption “habits” to explain the substantial persistence of aggregate consumption … growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of … of their personal circumstances but ‘sticky expectations' about the macroeconomy. In our model, the persistence of …

To predict the effects of the 2020 U.S. CARES Act on consumption, we extend a model that matches responses to past … consumption stimulus packages. The extension allows us to account for two novel features of the coronavirus crisis. First, during … lockdowns, many types of spending are undesirable or impossible. Second, some of the jobs that disappear during the lockdown …