The life-cycle consumption and permanent income hypotheses predict that if workers face greater likelihood of unemployment in the future that lowers expected future income, they will save more today. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by looking at the expenditure response of workers to the...

Economic theory predicts that individuals exposed to the risk of losing their job postpone their consumption and accumulate more assets to build a buffer stock of saving. We provide a new test of the hypothesis using substantial variation in severance payments across contracts in the Spanish...

Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. For example, being inactive on social media can lead to social exclusion or not owning luxury brands can be associated with having a low social status. We show that, in the presence of such spillovers to...

This paper measures how households smooth changes in consumption when incomes are shifted by permanent or transitory shocks at country and regional level. I compute insurance capacity using the Spanish Continuous Family Expenditure Survey skipping the imputation methods used by the previous...

As the 2012 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) illustrates, there are advantages to measuring consumer expenditures by tracking the authorization of payments by instrument type (cash, check, debit or credit card, etc.). The main advantages of payment diaries appear to be the following: 1)...

Private consumption has been a key driver of growth in Brazil for more than a decade. Over this time, Brazilian consumers have benefited from a favorable policy environment, a rapid phase of development-dramatically increasing economic, financial and social inclusion-and a supportive external...

This paper presents new evidence on the behavior of saving in the world, by extending previous empirical research in five dimensions. First, it is based on a very large and recent database, covering 165 countries from 1981 to 2012. Second, it conducts a robustness analysis across different...

Using households' balance sheet composition in the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, we identify six household types. Since 1999, there has been a decline in the share of patient households and an increase in the share of impatient households with negative wealth. Using a six-agent New Keynesian...

We document systematic and significant time variation in US lifecycle nondurable consumption profiles. Consumption profiles have consistently become flatter: intergenerational differences in consumption across age groups have decreased over time. Pooling data across different periods to identify...

This paper studies whether fiscal policy plays a stabilizing role in the context of import food price shocks. More precisely, the paper assesses whether fiscal policy dampens the adverse effect of import food price shocks on household consumption. Based on a panel of 70 low and middle-income...