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...

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...

We investigate whether business cycle fluctuations affect the degree of excess sensitivity of private consumption growth to disposable income growth. Using multivariate state space methods and quarterly US data for the period 1965-2000 we find that excess sensitivity is significantly higher...

A set of newly added questions in the 2011 to 2014 Bank of England/NMG Consulting Survey reveals that British households are estimated to change their consumption by significantly more in reaction to temporary and unanticipated falls in income than to rises of the same size. Household balance...

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...

This paper shows that relaxing borrowing constraints positively affects household consumption in addition to stimulating housing market activity. We focus on the UK Help-to-Buy (HTB) program, which provided a sudden relaxation of the down payment constraint by facilitating home purchases with...

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...

We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate's long stability (from the 1960s through the early 1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s-2007), and recent substantial increase (2008-2011) can all be interpreted using a parsimonious ‘buffer stock' model of optimal consumption in the presence of...