This paper characterizes empirically how government budget variables, such as spending, taxes, and deficits, affected private-sector consumption in the high-budget-deficit economy of Israel during the first half of the 1980s. The paper develops and estimates an intertemporal optimizing model of...

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,...

Sir John Hick's Value and Capital provided the theoretical foundation for an important element of modern macroeconomics. Intertemporal substitution - deferral or acceleration of economic activity in response to the real interest rate and other incentives - is the mechanism generally relied upon...

Are individuals effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth by either formal or informal mechanisms? This paper shows that under perfect insurance, marginal utility should grow at the same rate for all consumers, and that the distribution of measured consumption growth...

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...

We estimate the degree of 'stickiness' in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...

The consumption beta theorem of Breeden makes the expected return on any asset a function only of its covariance with changes in aggregate consumption. It is shown that the theorem is more robust than was indicated by Breeden. The theorem obtains even if one deletes Breeden's assumptions that...