This paper examines trends in household consumption and saving behaviour in each of the last three recessions in the UK. The 'Great Recession' has been different from those that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. It has been both deeper and longer, but also the composition of the cutbacks in...

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rate binds, monetary policy makers may lack traditional tools to stimulate aggregate demand. We investigate whether "unconventional" fiscal policy, in the form of pre-announced consumption tax changes, has the potential to meaningfully shift durables...

The paper employs a survey among Austrian households to study ownership and purchase intentions of crypto-assets. About 1.5% of Austrians own crypto-assets and about 5% can be viewed as potential adopters. Owners, on average, have higher financial knowledge and are more risk-tolerant than...

The paper analyzes why households in transition economies prefer to hold sizeable shares of their assets in cash at home rather than in banks. Using survey data from ten Central, Eastern and Southeastern European countries, I document the relevance of this behavior and show that cash preferences...

This paper develops a stylized short-run neo-Kaleckian model incorporating personal income inequality and income taxes based on You and Dutt (1996). The main goal is to investigate how changes in income taxes and personal income distribution affect output growth. The theoretical discussion of...

One might expect that rising US income inequality would reduce demand growth and create a drag on the economy because higher-income groups spend a smaller share of income. But during a quarter century of rising inequality, US growth and employment were reasonably strong, by historical standards,...

We identify 16,016 recipients of Covid-19 Economic Impact Payments in anonymized transaction-level debit card data from Facteus. We use an event study framework to show that in the two weeks following a sudden $1,200 payment from the IRS, consumers immediately increased spending by an average of...

Closely following the seminal contribution of Jappelli and Pistaferri (2014) - based on Italian household survey data - we employ data of 22 European countries to assess the role of heterogeneity of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) for fiscal policy in the Euro area. We document an...