Similar Search Results

Under-Savers Anonymous: Evidence on Self-Help Groups and Peer Pressure as a Savings Commitment Device

Meier, Stephan; Kast, Felipe; Pomeranz, Dina - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We test the effectiveness of self-help peer groups as a commitment device for precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microentrepreneurs in Chile. The first experiment finds that self-help peer groups are a powerful tool to increase savings (the number of...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010821682

Mortgage Rates, Household Balance Sheets, and the Real Economy

Keys, Benjamin J.; Piskorski, Tomasz; Seru, Amit; Yao, … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2014

This paper investigates the impact of lower mortgage rates on household balance sheets and other economic outcomes … relative terms, and an overall improvement in household credit standing. New financing of durable consumption by borrowers with … implications for the pass-through of monetary policy to the real economy through mortgage contracts and household balance sheets. …

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010951393

Winning the War: Poverty from the Great Society to the Great Recession

Meyer, Bruce D.; Sullivan, James X. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

This paper considers the long-run patterns of poverty in the United States from the early 1960s to 2010. Our results contradict previous studies that have argued that poverty has shown little improvement over time or that anti-poverty efforts have been ineffective. We find that moving from...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010796578

Five Decades of Consumption and Income Poverty

Meyer, Bruce D.; Sullivan, James X. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2009

This paper examines poverty in the United States from 1960 through 2005. We investigate how poverty rates and poverty gaps have changed over time, explore how these trends differ across family types, contrast these trends for several different income and consumption measures of poverty, and...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005579934

Measuring the Well-Being of the Poor Using Income and Consumption

Meyer, Bruce D.; Sullivan, James X. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2003

We evaluate consumption and income measures of the material well-being of the poor. We begin with conceptual and pragmatic reasons that favor income or consumption. Then, we empirically examine the quality of standard data by studying measurement error and under-reporting, and by comparing...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005580107

The Validity of Consumption Data: Are the Consumer Expenditure Interview and Diary Surveys Informative?

Meyer, Bruce D.; Bee, Adam; Sullivan, James X. - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

This paper examines the quality of data collected in the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, which is the source for the Consumer Price Index weights and is the main source of U.S. consumption microdata. We compare reported spending on a large number of categories of goods and services to...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011271446

The Caloric Costs of Culture: Evidence from Indian Migrants

Atkin, David - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

Anthropologists have long documented substantial and persistent differences across social groups in the preferences and taboos for particular foods. One natural question to ask is whether such food cultures matter in an economic sense. In particular, can culture constrain caloric intake and...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010674281

Prices and Supply Disruptions during Natural Disasters

Cavallo, Alberto Felipe; Rigobon, Roberto; Cavallo, Eduardo - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2013

We study the daily behavior of supermarket prices and product availability following two recent natural disasters: the 2010 earthquake in Chile and the 2011 earthquake in Japan. In both cases there was an immediate and persistent effect on product availability. The number of goods available for...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011105941

Productivity and the Welfare of Nations

Basu, Susanto; Schiantarelli, Fabio; Servén, Luis; … - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

We show that the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011227907

Lumpy Investment, Lumpy Inventories

Bachmann, Rüdiger; Ma, Lin - National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) - 2012

How do microeconomic frictions and microeconomic heterogeneity affect macroeconomic dynamics? We revisit the recent claim in the literature that nonconvex capital adjustment costs do not matter for aggregate dynamics. We argue that the neutrality of fixed adjustment frictions in general...

Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011188529