There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption.  This paper exploits liquid and illiquid wealth time series from household balance sheet data for South Africa, previously constructed by the authors, to explain fluctuations in the ratios of...

This paper undertakes a comparison exercise to disentangle what drives the opposite findings regarding the effect of house prices on consumption documented in two papers using the same data set for the UK.  On the one hand, Campbell and Cocco (2007) find that old owners are the most benefited...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks.  Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion...

In pre-industrial economies labour supply curves often bend backwards at very low levels of income.  This changed prior to the industrial revolution: total working hours increased (De Vries (1993), Voth (1998, 2000)).  This paper examines this industrious revolution using a model of labour...

After the global financial crisis, there is greater awareness of the need to understand the interactions between the financial sector and the real economy and hence the potential for financial instability.  Data from the financial flow of funds, previously relatively neglected, are now seen as...

A generalized version of the capital management problem posed in a classic paper by R.H. Strotz is analyzed for the case of the naive planner who fails to anticipate any impending change in his own preferences. By imposing progressively stronger restrictions on the primitive of the problem -...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy?  To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking...

Evidence from several countries reveals a substantial drop in household consumption around retirement age that some researchers believe is difficult to reconcile with standard life-cycle models.  Using detailed expenditure data from a Spanish panel survey, we find no evidence of a...

A stable, long run consumption equation is estimated for Australia using quarterly data from 1977(2) to 2008(2). The model incorporates non-property income, income expectations, uncertainty, disaggregated household wealth, demography and, importantly, a relaxation in household credit conditions...

The consumption behaviour of UK, US and Japanese households is examined and compared using a modern Ando-Modigliani style consumption function.  The models incorporate income growth expectations, income uncertainty, housing collateral and other credit effects.  These models therefore capture...