Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and...

This paper uses microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) to analyse the importance of precautionary saving under income uncertainty. In a cross-section of households, wealth in 2002 is regressed on alternative measures of income uncertainty. In addition to the usual controls,...

Saving decisions are complex, since there are many concurrent motives for saving a portion of one’s income. However, while the existing literature covers all of these motives, most contributions select only one of them as a focus and relegate the others to the background by making simplifying...

We compare projection methods with the standard value function grid algorithm in order to solve overlapping generations models. We apply the methods to a particular 60-period OLG model with elastic labor supply in order to study the effects of unfunded public pensions on aggregate savings and...

Using a new dataset for the German market, this article analyses whether modeling time-varying stochastic discount factor parameters in the CAPM of Sharpe (1964), the HCAPM of Jagannathan and Wang (1996) and the CCAPM of Lucas (1978) can help to explain the cross-section of book-to-market, size...

This paper studies how and why households adjust their spending, saving, and borrowing in response to transitory income shocks. We leverage new large-scale survey data to first quantitatively assess households' intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and deleverage (MPDs) (the...

This paper compares the impact of long term care (LTC) risk on single and married households and studies the roles played by informal care (IC), consumption sharing within households, and Medicaid in insuring this risk. We develop a life-cycle model where individuals face survival and health...

In a multicointegrated consumption function, consumption is explained by income and wealth, where wealth is measured as cumulated saving. This implies that income and wealth are cointegrated, and their impact on consumption cannot be estimated from a static cointegrating regression. It is...

A recent literature argues that persistent heterogeneity in wealth returns ("type dependence") as well as a positive association with wealth levels ("scale dependence") play an important role for explaining features of the wealth distribution, especially its extreme concentration at the top. In...

This paper adds life-cycle features to a New Keynesian model and shows how this places financial wealth at the center of consumption/saving decisions, thereby enriching the determinants of aggregate demand and affecting the transmission of monetary policy. As retirement preoccupations...