Among the many troublesome econometric relationships, the demand for money has proved especially recalcitrant, as evidenced by a long history of tinkering with basic specifications, always in response to some recent perceived forecast failure. The shortcomings of this approach and an alternative...

We assess the importance of the precautionary saving motive by relying on a direct question about precautionary wealth from the 1995 and 1998 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances. In this survey, a new question has been designed to elicit the amount of desired precautionary wealth. This...

In this paper we introduce a class of tentatively plausible, fixed-coefficient models of money demand and evaluate their forecast performance. When these models are re-estimated allowing all coefficients to vary over time, the forecasting performance improves dramatically. Aside from offering...

"Economic research on the efficient allocation of resources has a long history. Increasingly, attention has turned to inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes, and whether individuals or children are locked in their respective places in this distribution or whether...

The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) has a dual-frame sample design that supplements a standard area-probability frame with a sample of observations drawn from statistical records derived from tax returns. The tax-based frame is stratified on the basis of a "wealth index" constructed largely...

Identity is a critical concept in the rational interactions of any set of objects involving subject-object relationships. The objects must be distinguished according to some framework in order for such relationships to have meaning. In the world of economic systems, relationships such as...

We use the Federal Reserve's 2007, 2009 re-interview of 2007 respondents, and 2010 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCFs) to study how small businesses owned and actively managed by households fared during those turbulent years. Even though the surveys contain extensive data on a broad...

We use the Federal Reserve's 2007, 2009 re-interview of 2007 respondents, and 2010 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCFs) to examine the experiences of small businesses owned and actively managed by households during these turbulent years. This is the first paper to use these SCFs to study small...