State-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income to the same extent as U.S. aggregate data, but state-specific (idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged state-specific income - a result that also holds for Canadian provinces. We propose the...

U.S. consumption has gone through steep ups and downs since 2000. We quantify the statistical impact of income, unemployment, house prices, credit scores, debt, financial assets, expectations, foreclosures, and inequality on county-level consumption growth for four subperiods: the "dot-com...

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers percent via subsidies, while taxes...

We study the effect of education on equity ownership in the form of stocks or mutual funds (outside of retirement accounts). Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find a causal effect of education on stockholding using the number of colleges in the county where the respondent...

A simple model of time allocation between work and price-search predicts that consumers spend relatively more time searching for better prices for goods of which they consume relatively more. Using scanner data, we confirm empirically that consumers pay lower (higher) prices for goods that they...