The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

A vignette typically describes a hypothetical situation or object which respondents are asked to judge. The object is described as having different dimensions, the values of which are experimentally varied, so that their impact on respondents' judgments can be estimated. We examine 1) whether...