Using world commodity prices as an instrument, this paper proposes a novel method for decomposing channels of international risk sharing for commodity-exporting countries. The method identifies the commodity “sector”' as the projection of gross national product growth on commodity-price...

Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that endof- life...

I study how the cognitive demands of financial planning shape household decisionmaking with respect to consumption out of windfall income shocks. I build a quantitative model of bounded rationality in which reoptimization is costly. Households respond to windfall income shocks by choosing a...

We provide experimental evidence on how fiscal news shapes households' expectations and spending behavior. Using a new survey of ~11,000 Korean individuals linked to automatically collected high-frequency spending data, we elicit respondents' fiscal and macroeconomic beliefs and randomly provide...

Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that endof-life...

The fifth wave of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) offers an updated and comprehensive view of Maltese households' financial position in the post-pandemic period. Based on microdata collected for 2023, this edition introduces two analytical dimensions: in addition to the...

This paper estimates the causal effects of monetary policy shocks on household consumption, with additional analysis of labor market and income responses, disaggregated by gender and race. I find that contractionary monetary policy reduces consumption more for black than white households, with...

This paper studies household consumption behavior when saving motives differ due to preference or income risk heterogeneity. I show that self-insurance operates along two margins: a standard liquidity margin determined by the level of current resources and an intertemporal margin governed by...

The risk of a worker falling into unemployment represents one of the most important threats to the stability of households' finances - both in terms of lower spending (and hence living standards) and in terms of a greater degree of financial distress (such as the accumulation of unmanageable...

We use small-area estimation methods that combine information from a household budget survey, a much larger survey of local demographics and employment, and area-level information on bank account outflows and energy consumption to estimate average equivalised consumption measures across 367...

Hosting mega-sports events generates optimistic projections of economic benefits, yet empirical evidence on actual local returns remains mixed. Focusing on the UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany, this paper provides causal evidence on the short-term local consumption effects of hosting mega-events. We...

This study investigates the dynamic impact of population aging on consumption preferences in China, a critical area given consumption's role in global economic growth and the country's accelerating demographic shifts. Utilizing pooled panel data from the 2015, 2017, and 2019 China Household...

Using household survey data on expenditures and incomes, we construct an objective measure of corruption in the public sector for a broad spectrum of countries. Specifically, we focus on the consumption-income gap for public sector workers relative to private sector workers to gauge the extent...