We empirically examine the relationship between U.S. output and household debt. To account for structural change due to financial liberalization, we divide the sample at the fourth quarter of 1982. We find structural differences between earlier and later business cycles for the U.S. household...

While much attention has been focused on the financial woes of the US economy in the wake of the Great Recession, this chapter focuses on an important real sector imbalance: the failure of real wages to keep pace with productivity growth over the past three decades. This imbalance is shown to...

Multi-equation econometric frameworks are used to investigate the impact of household debt on aggregate performance in US. In the vector autoregression analysis capturing the transitory feedback effects, we observe a bidirectional positive feedback process between aggregate income and debt....

We develop a Keynesian model of aggregate consumption. Our theory emphasizes the importance of the relative income hypothesis and debt-finance for understanding household consumption behavior. It is shown that particular importance attaches to how net debtor households service their debts, and...

The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a marked contraction in US consumption spending that had hitherto been boosted by historically high levels of household debt-financing. These events question the validity of conventional models of consumption based on the life-cycle...

This chapter argues that, while much attention has been paid to developments in the financial sector as causes of the Great Recession, the ultimate cause of the crisis was, in fact, longer term trends in the real economy. Specifically, it is argued that the tendency for real wages to grow slower...

A number of studies have used survey data on traders' exchange rate forecasts to examine the role of risk and non-REH forecasting in accounting for excess returns in currency markets. This work re-examines those results using an alternative estimation technique, the Cointegrated VAR, which...

This study tests several models of the currency risk premium, but does so using survey data on traders' forecasts to directly measure the expected excess return. Among those tested are UIP, CAPM, and the Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE) gap model, which respectively imply that the premium is...

This paper is designed to review the empirical literature on the excess returns puzzle: the difficulty encountered by standard risk premium models in accounting for relative returns in the foreign exchange market. Of particular interest are the studies using survey data to decompose ex post...

The Consumption Capital Asset Pricing Model (CCAPM) has been widely rejected on the basis of its implausibly large estimates of risk aversion, despite numerous modifications to its specification of risk preferences. This study instead relaxes the assumption of perfect foresight (REH), and uses...