Two competing explanations of the UK consumer boom in the late 1980s are the financial liberalization-imperfect housing market hypothesis of Muellbauer and Murphy and the hypothesis of King. We use 15 years of Family Expenditure Surveys, and cohort analysis, to investigate to what extent these...

The aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro-level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand. To do this, the authors utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4,000 households in each of fifteen years. Employing a number of different...

In this paper, the authors present empirical evidence on aggregation problems with Euler equations for consumption. Their main results are that the estimates of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution for consumption are consistently lower for aggregate data than for average cohort data and...

If consumers have finite lives, the aggregate consumption growth equation is affected by entries and exits (births and deaths). The authors use two- and three-period overlapping-generations models to show that entries and exits produce a relationship between aggregate consumption growth and the...

We argue that health care quality has an important impact on economic inequality and on saving behavior. We exploit district-wide variability in health care quality provided by the Italian universal public health system to identify the effect of quality on income inequality, health inequality...

In this paper we estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings in Europe, by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals who had access to many or few books at age ten. We instrument years of education using reforms of...

We estimate the effect of education on lifetime income in Europe, by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals who had access to many or few books at age ten. We instrument years of education using reforms of compulsory...

This paper provides a critical survey of the large literature on the life cycle model of consumption, both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. It discusses several approaches that have been taken in the literature to bring the model to the data, their empirical successes and...

We use the subjective probabilities of bequests to be given in the future and current asset holdings, as reported in three household surveys (HRS, ELSA, and SHARE) covering thirteen countries, in order to assess whether, and to what extent, households plan to decumulate assets in old age. We...