We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate’s long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s - 2007), and recent substantial increase (2008 - 2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious ‘buffer stock’ model of optimal...

This Selected Issues paper for the United States discusses the microeconomics of the country—household wealth and savings. Households’ consumption-saving decisions have an important bearing on the U.S. economic outlook. This paper demonstrates how households with consistently lower...

This paper studies a panel of China's provinces over the period 1996-2009 during which urban household saving rates increased from 19 percent of disposable income to 30 percent. It finds that the increase in urban saving rates is negatively associated with the decline in real interest rates over...

The paper studies how high household leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and 1983-2008 both exhibited a large increase in the income share of high-income households, a large increase in debt leverage of the...

Despite its obvious importance, not much marketing research focuses on how business-cycle fluctuations affect individual companies and/or industries. Often, one only has aggregate information on the state of the national economy, even though cyclical contractions and expansions need not have an...

Evidence indicates that consumer durables are more flexibly priced than nondurable goods and services. In otherwise standard two-sector neoclassical sticky-price models with flexible durable prices, following monetary tightening, nondurables decrease but consumer durables increase. Friction in...

From 1995 to 2005, the average urban household saving rate in China rose by 7 percentage points, to ¼ of disposable income. We use household-level data to explain the postponing of consumption despite rapid income growth. Tracing cohorts over time indicates virtually no consumption smoothing...

The aim of the paper was to analyze the level and structure of household consumption as well as the consumer durables in Poland in comparison to other European countries. The data came from GUS, Statistisches Bundesamt and Eurostat, between 2001and 2011. In the households located in Western and...

The aim of the paper was to analyze the level and structure of household consumption as well as the consumer durables in Poland in comparison to other European countries. The data came from GUS, Statistisches Bundesamt and Eurostat, between 2001and 2011. In the households located in Western and...

In Brazil, wives do most of the household work. About sixty percent of them also work outside the household, working a total of about 10 hours more per week than men. Because of this unequal distribution of household work, husbands and wives might have different priorities regarding the purchase...