Despite the rise in public debt, Japanese Government Bond (JGB) yields have remained low and stable, supported by steady inflows from household and corporate sectors, high domestic ownership of JGBs, and safe-haven flows in light of ongoing European debt crisis. Nonetheless, the market capacity...

Standard theoretical models of household saving behavior do not typically assume that household perceptions of the world change in response to observed events. In light of the potential importance of such perception changes (e.g., after a financial crisis), this paper considers the hypothesis...

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,...

A large body of microeconomic evidence supports Friedman (1957)'s proposition that household income can be reasonably well described as having both transitory and permanent components. We show how to modify the widely-used macroeconomic model of Krusell and Smith (1998) to accommodate such a...

We present a macroeconomic model calibrated to match both microeconomic and macroeconomic evidence on household income dynamics. When the model is modified in a way that permits it to match empirical measures of wealth inequality in the U.S., we show that its predictions (unlike those of...

This study investigates how inflation expectations affect precautionary wealth by using Japanese household survey data.A key contribution of this study is that it confirms the prediction of the buffer stock (Carroll, 1997) that, given the nominal interest rate, higher inflation expectations...

A large body of microeconomic evidence supports Friedman (1957)'s proposition that household income can be reasonably well described as having both transitory and permanent components. We show how to modify the widely-used macroeconomic model of Krusell and Smith (1998) to accommodate such a...