A striking feature of U.S. data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age. Using both panel data and an equilibrium life cycle model, we argue that this is informative for understanding the importance and the characteristics of idiosyncratic labor market risk. We find that...

We analyze how relative wage movements across birth cohorts and education groups during the 1980s affected the distribution of household consumption. The analysis integrates the labor economics literature on time variation in the wage structure with the consumption insurance literature. In...

This paper examines changes in the distribution of income and consumption in the United States during the 1980s. using data from the Current Population Survey (income) and Consumer Expenditure Survey (consumption). We reach three primary conclusions. First. changes in the distribution of...

This paper investigates the role of income-driven differences in consumption patterns in explaining and projecting energy demand and <i>CO_2</i> emissions. We develop and estimate a general-equilibrium model with non-homothetic preferences across a large set of countries and sectors, and trace embodied...

Rising income inequality since the 1980s in the United States has generated a substantial increase in saving by the top of the income distribution, which we call the saving glut of the rich. The saving glut of the rich has been as large as the global saving glut, and it has not been associated...

Earnings dynamics are much richer than typically assumed in macro models with heterogenous agents. This holds for individual-pre-tax and household-post-tax earnings and across administrative (Social Security Administration) and survey (Panel Study of Income Dynamics) data. We study the...

To what extent does household inequality affect the response of aggregate consumption to aggregate real shocks? We first review two state-of-the-art papers with household heterogeneity and aggregate uncertainty. They teach us that having a larger fraction of poor and borrowing constrained...

We use a large, representative panel data set from India with monthly data on household finances to examine the incidence of economic harms during the COVID pandemic. We observe a sharp spike in poverty, peaking during India's sharp but short lockdown. However, there was a striking decrease in...

This paper first documents the evolution of the cross-sectional income and consumption distribution in the US in the past 25 years. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey we find that a rising income inequality has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality....

We revisit to what extent the increase in income inequality over the last 30 years has been mirrored by consumption inequality. We do so by constructing two alternative measures of consumption expenditure, using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE). We first use reports of active...