We study how 3,534 beneficiaries of PROSPERA, Mexico's cash transfer program, smooth food consumption around the transfer payday, an anticipated and transitory income shock. We find that food consumption and food security do not change around the transfer payday, including for recipients with...

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and government interventions have reshaped economic activity with abrupt changes in household consumption behavior across the world. This paper provides an empirical investigation of how the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has affected consumer spending at daily...

Previous experimental results (Ballinger et al., 2003 and Carbone and Hey, 2004) have found that many agents fail to correctly take into account the length of the planning horizon also finding some support (See Carbone, 2006) for descriptive models, such as the Rolling Model. This paper presents...

Expenditure visibility—the extent to which a household's spending on a consumption category is noticeable to others—is measured in three new surveys, with ~3,000 telephone and online respondents. Visibility shows little change across time (ten years) and survey methods. Four different...

We analyze consumer sentiment with a novel survey of Thai and Vietnamese consumers conducted in May 2020, that is, shortly after the end of the immediate lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a randomized control trial, we expose subgroups of the survey respondents to four different...

This paper uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to investigate the direct and indirect effect of beliefs of others on respondent's own beliefs and on their individual consumer sentiment. In a new online consumer survey with randomized control trials (RCTs) in Thailand and Vietnam, we...

This paper examines the structure and evolution of consumption and consumption growth inequality. Once heterogeneous agents relate their neighbors' consumption to their own, consumption volatility and inequality are affected. The relationship predicted between the group average consumption...

The weight of individual charitable contribution in the total contribution has decreased significantly since 1979. The fraction of household income spent on cash contribution has also declined during the same period. We examine the factors behind these trends. We find that stock market return,...

In this paper, we analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly depending on what criterion is used to...

Lifetime financial-, work- and health-related decisions made by agents are intertwined with one another. Understanding how these decisions are made is essential to gauge if saving in financial, retirement and human assets is adequate or not. This paper numerically solves, simulates, and...