This Selected Issues paper for the United States discusses the microeconomics of the country—household wealth and savings. Households’ consumption-saving decisions have an important bearing on the U.S. economic outlook. This paper demonstrates how households with consistently lower...

This paper calculates the levels of optimal national saving, investment, and the current account balance for five Asian economies—Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines—for the period 1997–2050 using a simulation approach. These calculations show the sensitivity of...

We question the conventional view that it is optimal for government to maintain a stable level of spending out of oil wealth. We compare this conventional policy recommendation with one where government spends all of its oil revenues upfront, at the same rate as oil is extracted. Using a...

This paper shows that increasing government social expenditures can make a substantive contribution to increasing household consumption in China. The paper first undertakes an empirical study of the relationship between the savings rate and social expenditures for a panel of OECD countries and...

Household savings rates in the United States have recently crept up from all-time lows. Some have suggested that a shift toward frugality will hamper GDP growth-the Keynesian "paradox of thrift." We estimate that households compensate for a fall in their asset income by saving more out of their...

This Selected Issues paper on France underlies public intervention in financial markets. Econometric analysis indicates that in the long term, consumption tracks disposable income closely but is also affected by wealth effects. A counterfactual exercise suggests that a lower return to experience...

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the behavior of the economy has changed in many fundamental ways over the last decades. In particular, greater financial deregulation, larger wealth accumulation, and better policies might have helped lower uncertainty about future income and lengthen...

In this paper, we revisit the effects of government spending shocks on private consumption within an estimated New-Keynesian DSGE model of the euro area featuring non-Ricardian households. Employing Bayesian inference methods, we show that the presence of non- Ricardian households is in general...

How does access to credit impact consumption volatility? Theory and evidence from advanced economies suggests that greater household access to finance smooths consumption. Evidence from emerging markets, where consumption is usually more volatile than income, indicates that financial reform...

This paper examines how durable goods and financial frictions shape the business cycle of a small open economy subject to shocks to trend and transitory shocks. In the data, nondurable consumption is not as volatile as income for both developed and emerging market economies. The simulation of...