During the past two decades, the personal saving rate in the United States has fallen from eight percent to below zero. This paper demonstrates that this change represents a major shift in the allocation of newly produced goods. The share of GDP that households consume rose by 6 percentage...

Using a structural life-cycle model and data on school visits from Safegraph and school closures from Burbio, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the Corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental...

Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation in amount, receipt, and timing of receipt of Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) authorized by the CARES Act, this paper estimates that people spent less of their EIPs in the few months following arrival than in similar previous policy episodes and...

The Federal Reserve characterizes its current policy decisions in terms of targets for the fed funds rate and the size of its balance sheet. The fed funds rate today is essentially an administered rate that is heavily influenced by regulatory arbitrage and divorced from its traditional role as a...

We investigate the welfare consequences of the stark increase in wage and earnings inequality in the US over the last 30 years. Our data stems from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is the only US data set that contains information on wages, hours worked, earnings and consumption for the...

This paper examines the empirical relationship in the postwar United States between the aggregate business cycle and various aspects of the macroeconomy, such as production, interest rates, prices, productivity, sectoral employment, investment, income, and consumption. This is done by examining...

The average length of business cycle contractions in the United States fell from 20.5 months in the prewar period to 10.7 months in the postwar period. Similarly, the average length of business cycle expansions rose from 25.3 months in the prewar period to 49.9 months in the postwar period. This...

This paper catalogs the business cycle properties of 163 monthly U.S. economic time series over the three decades from 1959 through 1988. Two general sets of summary statistics are reported. The first set measures the comovement of each individual time series with a reference series representing...

Households spent only a small fraction of their 2020 Economic Impact Payment (EIPs) within a couple of months of arrival, consistent with i) pandemic constraints on spending, ii) other pandemic programs and social insurance, and iii) the broader disbursement of the EIPs compared to the economic...