Using comprehensive account records, this paper examines how individuals respond to a temporary drop in income following the 2013 U.S. Federal Government shutdown. Affected employees saw their income decline by 40% on average, which was recovered within two weeks. Despite having no effect on...

Older wealthholders spend down assets slowly. To study this pattern, the paper introduces health dependent utility into a model in which different preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care (LTC), and ordinary consumption combine with health and longevity uncertainty...

This paper introduces the Vanguard Research Initiative (VRI), a new panel survey of wealthholders designed to yield high-quality measurements of a large sample of older Americans who arrive at retirement with significant financial assets. The VRI links survey data with a variety of...

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. It constructs a narrative using news reports and government announcements to...

Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job...

The value of installed computers falls rapidly and therefore computers have a very high user cost. The paper provides a complete account of the non-financial user cost of personal computers -- decomposing it into replacement cost change, obsolescence, instantaneous depreciation, and age-related...

A number of analysts have claimed recently that the consumer price index overstates the annual increase in the cost of living. This paper develops a framework for studying measurement problems in the consumer price index and systematically analyzes the available evidence concerning the magnitude...

Was the Depression forecastable? After the Crash, how long did it take contemporary economic forecasters to realize how severe the downturn was going to be? How long should it Have taken them to come to this realization? These questions are addressed by studying the predictions of the Harvard...

Survey measures of preference parameters provide a means for accounting for otherwise unobserved heterogeneity.This paper presents measures of relative risk tolerance based on responses to survey questions about hypothetical gambles over lifetime income.It discusses how to impute estimates of...

In 2001, many households received rebate checks as advanced payments of the benefit of the new, 10 percent federal income tax bracket. A survey conducted at the time the rebates were mailed finds that few households said that the rebate led them mostly to increase spending. A follow-up survey in...