The consumption Euler equation is a building block of modern macro theory. Yet, the existing evidence on aggregate data offers very conflicting results for the estimates of the degree of forward-lookingness and interest rate semi-elasticity. The disappointing performance can be rationalized by...

The combination of credit constraints and indivisible consumption goods may induce some riskaverse individuals to play lotteries to have a chance of crossing a purchasing threshold. One implication of this is that income effects for individuals who choose to play lotteries are likely to be...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

Motivated by the success of internal habit formation preferences in explaining asset pricing puzzles, we introduce these preferences in a life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice with liquidity constraints, undiversifiable labor income risk and stock-market participation costs. In...

We solve and estimate a life-cycle model with earnings risk and liquidity constraints in the presence of tax-deferred retirement accounts (TDAs). We explicitly consider two very different types of households (with TDAs): direct and indirect stockholders. The latter hold stocks only through TDAs...

This Paper solves numerically for the optimal consumption and portfolio choice of an infinitely lived investor facing short sales and borrowing constraints, undiversifiable labour income risk and a predictable time varying equity premium. The investor aggressively times the market while positive...

This paper investigates consumption behavior within an intertemporal optimization model of the representative household. Our dataset consists of deposits and withdrawals from individual household checking accounts that received paychecks by direct deposit. We construct samples of panel data for...

Using a long span of expenditure survey data and a new narrative measure of exogenous income tax changes for the United Kingdom, we show that households with mortgage debt exhibit large and persistent consumption responses to tax changes. Home-owners without a mortgage, in contrast, do not...

In the context of an overlapping generations model, we show that liquidity constraints on households: (i) raise the saving rate; (ii) strengthen the effect of growth on saving; and (iii) increase the growth rate if productivity growth is endogenous. These propositions are supported by...

If some consumers are liquidity-constrained, aggregate consumption should be ‘excessively sensitive’ to credit conditions as well as to income. Moreover, the ‘excess sensitivity’ may vary over time. Using data for Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, we find a...