How sizable is the wealth effect on consumption in euro area countries? To address this question, we use newly available harmonized euro area wealth data and the methodology in Carroll et al. (2011b). We find that the marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth averaged across the largest...

We examine the household consumption response to fluctuations in income and uncertainty, exploiting a large panel dataset that spans the period of the Great Recession. The results show that after controlling for changes in realized income, both household-specific income uncertainty and local...

This paper is devoted to the role of information context in the dynamics of consumption/savings decisions. The deviations from the traditional model of rational expectations are investigated, and the hypotheses of the «rational inattention» are tested. The basis for the study was a selection...

Using Bayesian methods, we estimate a small open economy model in which consumers face limits to credit determined by the value of their housing stock. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the role of collateralized household debt in the Canadian business cycle. Our findings show that the...

Disaster models are typically agnostic as to what spawns tail events, but are often calibrated on labor shocks. Using a novel way to construct rare event factors using the CEX survey data, I study whether the type of idiosyncratic shock modeled matters empirically. I estimate an augmented...

We confirm the negative relationship between household debt and future GDP growth documented in Mian, Sufi, and Verner (2017) for a wider set of countries over the period 1950-2016. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms help explain this relationship. First, debt overhang impairs household...

1. This research examines the potential impact of the stock market crash of 2008-2009 on U.S. working households. The Great Recession caused financial problems for many households in terms of unemployment, business losses, and decreases in real estate values, but the broadly based decreases in...

Macroeconomics is evolving from the study of aggregate dynamics to the study of the dynamics of the entire equilibrium distribution of allocations across individual economic actors. This article reviews the quantitative macroeconomic literature that focuses on household heterogeneity, with a...