This paper explores economic measures that are surprisingly hard to assemble: US household income quintiles’ annual spending relative to annual income. The total sector’s income-minus-spending surplus is heavily dominated by the top 20%. The bottom 80% runs persistent spending deficits,...

This paper employs the recently released BEA Distribution of Personal Income accounts to explore economic measures that have been surprisingly hard to assemble: household income quintiles’ annual spending relative to annual income. The personal sector’s income-minus-spending surplus...

This paper employs the recently released BEA Distribution of Personal Income accounts to explore economic measures that have been surprisingly hard to assemble: household income quintiles’ annual spending relative to annual income. The personal sector’s income-minus-spending surplus...

This paper aims to explore how mortgage and consumer loans arrears are affected by household financial and social status as well as macroeconomic situation and banking standards and restrictions. In general, arrears could pose an elevated risk to the financial stability of banks and could...

This paper studies children as a risky asset associated to an investment option. Children provide utility but have a stochastic maintenance cost. We obtain several new results relative to models where children are deterministic goods, among which: i) Higher child risks diminish fertility and...

The economic growth implications due to changes in the nation’s age structure have been substantial. In the course of the demographic transition, countries experience an increasing share of the working age population relative to the total population and this creates favorable effects on...

In the quantitative macro literature, single agent models are heavily used to explain "per-adult equivalent" household data. In this paper, we study differences between consumption predictions from a single agent model and "adult equivalent" consumption predictions from a model where household...

In the quantitative macro literature, single agent models are heavily used to explain "per-adult equivalent" household data. In this paper, we study differences between consumption predictions from a single agent model and "adult equivalent" consumption predictions from a model where household...

In the quantitative macroeconomics literature, single agent models are widely used to explain ``per-adult equivalent'' data, which are obtained at the household level. In this paper we suggest a simple framework to understand the sources of bias when these models are used to make predictions for...

Although the link between household size and consumption has a strong empirical support, there is no consistent way in which demographics are dealt with in standard life-cycle models. We study the relationship between the predictions of the Single Agent model (the standard in the literature)...