We study the redistributive effects of inflation combining administrative bank data with an information provision experiment during an episode of historic inflation. On average, households are well-informed about prevailing inflation and are concerned about its impact on their wealth; yet, while...

Consumption is the largest component of GDP. Since the 1950s, the life cycle and the permanent income models have constituted the main analytical tools to the study of consumption behavior, both at the micro and at the aggregate levels. Since the late 1970s the literature has focused on versions...

Only one-fourth of U.S. families own stock. This paper examines whether the consumption of stockholders differs from the consumption of non-stockholders and whether these differences help explain the empirical failures of the consumption-based CAPM. Household panel data are used to construct...

Macroeconomic research on consumption has been influenced profoundly by rational expectations. First, rational expectations together with the hypothesis of constant expected real interest rates implies that consumption should evolve as a random walk. Much of the research of the past decade has...

For thirty years, it has been accepted that consumption is smooth because permanent income is smoother than measured income. This paper considers the evidence for the contrary position, that permanent income is in fact less smooth than measured income, so that the smoothness of consumption...

Consumption and income tend to move together; the correlation of their first differences is about 0.14. In most accounts, the correlation is attributed to the upward slope of the consumption function. When the publicis better off, they consume more. But in the microeconomic theory of the...

Does a higher real interest rate induce significant postponement of consumption? According to the theory developed here, this question can be answered by studying the relation between the rate of growth of consumption and expected real interest rates. In postwar data for the United States,...

The main stated purposes of social insurance programs have been the maintenance of consumption by people suffering from misfortunes, and the stabilization of employment. Despite this, most recent research on unemployment insurance (UI) and Old Age Insurance has focused on secondary labor-market...

Over the last 15 years, the typical household has increasingly concentrated its spending on a few preferred products. However, this is not driven by "superstar" products capturing larger market shares. Instead, households increasingly purchase different products from each other. As a result,...

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...