This paper uses data taken from the tax returns of all Icelandic taxpayers in 2005-2019, a period that saw large changes in disposable income around the country's financial crisis in 2008, to plot the life-cycle path of consumption and income for different education groups and to estimate the...

Household consumption data are often unavailable, not fully collected, or incomparable over time in poorer countries. Survey-to-survey imputation has been increasingly employed to address these data gaps for poverty measurement, but its effective use requires standardized protocols. We refine...

Household consumption data are often unavailable, not fully collected, or incomparable over time in poorer countries. Survey-to-survey imputation has been increasingly employed to address these data gaps for poverty measurement, but its effective use requires standardized protocols. We refine...

Interest rates have generally trended downward over the past several decades. It has made borrowing cheaper, which has encouraged people to spend more. It has also made saving less attractive, contributing to increased consumption. At the same time, the role of household credit increased...

With 20 years of PSID data, we document persistent racial differentials in life-cycle consumption dynamics. Starting from similar positions in the consumption distribution Blacks end up in lower percentiles than Whites. Education, income, and wealth are three key drivers of these different...

This paper replicates the article Fiorito and Kollintzas (2004) "Public goods, merit goods, and the relationship between private and government consumption". The authors investigated whether government consumption crowds out private consumption by splitting government consumption into two...

The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

This paper studies the direct impact of households' debt on consumption over the business cycle. We use household-level panel data for Spain, and focus on a interesting period of analysis, 2002-2017, characterized by large variations in leverage, consumption, and asset prices. We find that debt...

Households' and firms' subjective inflation expectations play a central role in macroeconomic and intertemporal microeconomic models. We discuss how subjective inflation expectations are measured, the patterns they display, their determinants, and how they shape households' and firms' economic...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

This paper uses data taken from the tax returns of all Icelandic taxpayers in 2005-2019, a period that saw large changes in disposable income around the country's financial crisis in 2008, to plot the life-cycle path of consumption and income for different education groups and to estimate the...

This paper uses housing returns to estimate the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) in consumption for fifteen advanced economies over the postwar period 1950-2015. As housing is the main asset for the majority of households, returns on housing are better suited to estimate the EIS...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus and the resulting falls in demand due both to uncertainty and policy interventions such as lockdowns, "social distancing," and travel restrictions are having a severe impact on Asian economies and hence on Asian households. These negative impacts come through a...

This paper presents a novel method to estimate the depreciation rate of durable goods using a combination of identified marginal and average spending shares. We apply our method to Chinese spending responses to disposable income changes induced by monetary policy in 2008-2009. The marginal...

A theory in which the timing of consumer expectation adjustments is endogenously state-dependent and stochastic is proposed. These expectation adjustments generate highly heterogenous consumption responses to income windfalls: many households do not respond, those who do over-react, the marginal...

We document relevant racial differences in the degree consumption insurance against shocks: Blacks appear to be less insured. We probe these results by performing a double/debiased lasso estimation of the treatment effects of a health shock, and we find that such effects are both larger and more...

This study uses Cointegration and an Error Correction Model to investigate the responsiveness of household consumption to changes in income in Sierra Leone covering the periods 1980 to 2020. The study relies on annual time series data on consumption and gross domestic product from the World...

We review the theoretical justification of consumption taxes in advanced economies, providing a systematic overview of the vast public finance literature exploring how goods and services should be taxed. Our discussion focuses on both the determinants of the optimal level of consumption taxation...

Panel data are rarely available for developing countries. Departing from traditional pseudo-panel methods that require multiple rounds of cross-sectional data to study poverty mobility at the cohort level, we develop a procedure that works with as few as two survey rounds and produces point...

The paucity of reliable, timely household consumption data in many low- and middleincome countries has made it difficult to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard poverty measurement requires collecting household consumption data, which is rarely done by...

We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, education specific productivity shocks, and catastrophic...

Household borrowing and spending rise with house prices, particularly for leveraged households, but household spending is not consumption. We propose an alternative borrow-to-invest motive by which house price gains affect household spending on residential investment: rational, leveraged...

This paper presents a novel method to estimate the depreciation rate of durable goods using a combination of identified marginal and average spending shares. We apply our method to Chinese spending responses to disposable income changes induced by monetary policy in 2008-2009. The marginal...

Known in the literature as underutilized, neglected or orphan crops, these crops have been cited as having the potential to improve food and nutritional security. The literature also highlights however that consumers in developing countries are increasingly abandoning their traditional diets...

This paper estimates a structural model of household behavior in the presence of cash transfers to recover the amount of resources allocated to men, women, and children. Using data from Ecuador, I find that there are important intra-household inequalities, but the transfer induces a...

This paper studies the consumption response to an increase in the domestic value of foreign currency household debt during a large depreciation. We use detailed consumption survey data that follows households for four years around Hungary's 2008 currency crisis. We find that, relative to similar...

The idea that certain economic variables are roughly constant in the long-run is an old one. Kaldor described them as stylized facts, whereas Klein and Kosobud labelled them great ratios. While such ratios are widely adopted in theoretical models in economics as conditions for balanced growth,...

This paper uses housing returns to estimate the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) in consumption for fifteen advanced economies over the postwar period 1950 − 2015. As housing is the main asset for the majority of households, returns on housing are better suited to estimate the...

The present paper deals with the issue of food waste in selected European countries, in which we have tried to analyze the socioeconomic rations. The main aim of our research was to analyze food waste quantity and compare the amount of wasted food in European Union countries (except Cyprus due...

A theory in which the timing of consumer expectation adjustments is endogenously state-dependent and stochastic is proposed. These expectation adjustments generate highly heterogenous consumption responses to income windfalls: many households do not respond, those who do over-react, the marginal...

This paper replicates the article Fiorito and Kollintzas (2004) “Public goods, merit goods, and the relationship between private and government consumption”. The authors investigated whether government consumption crowds out private consumption by splitting government consumption into two...