We estimate the degree of 'stickiness' in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...

We present a tractable model of the effects of nonfinancial risk on intertemporal choice. Our purpose is to provide a simple framework that can be adopted in fields like representative-agent macroeconomics, corporate finance, or political economy, where most modelers have chosen not to...

We model the motives for residents of a country to hold foreign assets, including the precautionary motive that has been omitted from much previous literature as intractable. Our model captures many of the principal insights from the existing specialized literature on the precautionary motive,...

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 is clear evidence that consumption and income growth...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

We estimate the fraction of the wealth of a sample of PSID respondents that is held because some households face greater income uncertainty than others. We first derive an equation characterizing the theoretical relationship between wealth and uncertainty in a buffer-stock model of saving. Next,...

This paper argues that the typical household's saving is better described by a traditional version of the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis (LC/PIH) model. Buffer-stock behavior emerges if consumers with important income uncertainty are sufficiently impatient. In the traditional model,...

This paper shows that standard empirical methods for estimating log-linearized consumption Euler equations cannot successfully uncover structural parameters like the coefficient of relative risk aversion from the dataset of simulated consumers behaving exactly according to the standard model....

Papers in variety of disparate literatures have recently suggested that habit formation in consumption may explain several empirical puzzles, ranging from the level and cyclical variability of the equity premium (Abel (1990,1999); Constantinides (1990); Jermann (1998); Campbell and Cochrane...

This paper compares the dynamics of two general equilibrium models of endogenous growth in which agents have comparison utility.' In the inward-looking' economy, individuals care about how their consumption in the current period compares to their own consumption in the past (one way to describe...