This paper examines an unconventional, but potentially effective, new fiscal policy tool that can increase saving during good times and increase spending during bad times -- a cyclical matching rate on contributions to retirement savings accounts. The combination of matching rates and matching...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

This paper studies the incentive costs of housing booms. We use the type and actual time stamps of 9.3 million credit card transactions by over 200,000 cardholders from a large commercial bank to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. After positive shocks to house prices, employees...

In this paper, we differentiate consumption from expenditure by incorporating price search decision into an otherwise standard life-cycle model. In our model, households can pay lower prices for the same consumption good if they allocate more time for price search. We first analytically show...

We explore the dynamics of demand for n designs of a good when agents have preferences for (anti-)conformity. Agents differ in their social status and each agent seeks to imitate those of higher status and to distinguish herself from those of lower status, relative to her own status. In each...

We propose a new category of consumption goods, memorable goods, that generate a flow of utility after consumption. We analyze an otherwise standard consumption model that distinguishes memorable goods from other nondurable goods. Consumers optimally choose lumpy consumption of memorable goods....

There exists an extensive literature estimating idiosyncratic labor income processes. While a wide variety of models are estimated, GMM estimators are almost always used. We examine the validity of using likelihood based estimation in this context by comparing the small sample properties of a...

Using new micro data on household wealth from fifteen European countries, the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, we first document the substantial cross-country variation in how various measures of wealth are distributed across individual households. Through the lens of a standard,...

The Great Recession and the years that followed witnessed a dramatic expansion in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits available to unemployed workers in the United States. An important motivation for this policy was to stimulate demand by transferring funds to households that...

This study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine whether self-regulation, proxied by regularly dining together with family, is associated with better financial preparedness and greater wealth accumulation across time among households. Findings reveal that individuals who...