Many papers show that aggregate fertility is pro-cyclical over the business cycle. In this paper we do something else: using data on more than 100 million births and focusing on within-year changes in fertility, we show that for recent recessions in the United States, the growth rate for...

This paper studies the effect that changing demographic patterns have had on the household saving rate in China. We undertake a quantitative investigation using an overlapping generations (OLG) model where agents live for 85 years. Consumers begin to exercise decision making when they are 18....

We present a model of household life-cycle saving decisions in order to quantify the impact of demographic changes on aggregate household saving rates in Japan, China, and India. The observed age distributions help explain the contrasting saving patterns over time across the three countries. In...

We decompose the response of aggregate consumption to monetary policy shocks into contributions by households at different stages of the life cycle. This decomposition finds that older households have a higher consumption response than younger households. Amongst older households, the...

We employ a model of precautionary saving to study why household saving rates are so high in China and so low in the US. The use of recursive preferences gives a convenient decomposition of saving into precautionary and non precautionary components. This decomposition indicates that over 80...