Environmental policy is increasingly concerned with measuring emissions resulting from local changes to electricity consumption. These marginal emissions are challenging to measure because electricity grids encompass multiple locations and the information available to identify the effect of each...

International risk-sharing has far-reaching implications both for economic policy and for basic research in economics. When countries do not share risk, individuals in those countries experience fluctuations in their consumption levels that are undesirable and possibly unnecessary. This paper...

Bernanke (2005) hypothesized that a "global savings glut" was causing large trade imbalances. However, we show that the global savings rates did not show a robust upward trend during the relevant period. Moreover, if there had been a global savings glut there should have been a large investment...

This paper reviews the behavior of financial asset prices in relation to consumption. The paper lists some important stylized facts that characterize US data, and relates them to recent developments in equilibrium asset pricing theory. Data from other countries are examined to see which features...

We measure the amount of smoothing achieved through various components of the government deficit in EU and OECD countries. For EU countries, at the 1-year frequency percent of shocks to GDP are smoothed via government consumption, 18 percent via transfers percent via subsidies, while taxes...

In earlier work we documented two episodes in which a sharp fiscal consolidation was associated with a very large expansions in private domestic demand. In this paper we draw on further evidence to investigate if and when fiscal policy changes can have such non-Keynesian effects. In the first...

This paper documents some previously neglected features of sectoral shares at business cycle frequencies in OECD economies. In particular, we find that the nontraded sector share of output is as volatile as aggregate GDP, and that for most countries, the nontraded sector is distinctly...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to stark reductions in economic activity in India. We employ CMIE's Consumer Pyramids Household Survey to examine the timing, distribution, and mechanism of the impacts from this shock on income and consumption through December 2020. First, we estimate large and...

What model features and calibration strategies yield a large average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) in heterogeneous agent models? Through a systematic investigation of models with different preferences, dimensions of ex-ante heterogeneity, income processes and asset structure, we show...

The paper analyzes consumption decisions of retired workers, using Danish register data. A major puzzle, which motivates much of the analysis below, is that wealth actually increases for a large fraction of the people in our data. One would expect that wealth accumulated before retirement would...