In data from an account aggregator, households increase consumption when they receive (expected) tax refunds, as if they are liquidity constrained. However, this behavior is not due to liquidity constraints or hand-to-mouth behavior. These same households smooth consumption when making payments...

This paper provides the first evidence that value-added education accountability schemes induce dynamic distortions. Extending earlier dynamic moral hazard models, I propose a new test for ratchet effects, showing that classroom inputs are distorted less when schools face a shorter horizon over...

This paper studies household financial choices: why are these decisions dependent on the education level of the household? A life cycle model is constructed to understand a rich set of facts about decisions of households with different levels of education attainment regarding stock market...

In labor markets, the ratchet effect refers to a situation where workers subject to performance pay choose to restrict their output, because they rationally anticipate that firms will respond to higher output levels by raising output requirements or cutting pay. We model this effect as a...

We propose a simple saving-based measure of the cyclical component in GDP. The measure is motivated by the prediction that the represenative consumer changes savings in response to temporary deviations of income from its stochastic trend, while satisfying a present-value budget constraint. To...

We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health and...

We derive testable implications of model in which first best allocations are not achieved because of a moral hazard problem with hidden saving. We show that in this environment agents typically achieve more insurance than that obtained under autarchy via saving, and that consumption allocation...

A number of empirical studies document that marginal cost shocks are not fully passed through to prices at the firm level and that prices are substantially less volatile than costs. We show that in the relative-deep-habits model of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2006), firm-specific marginal...

This paper argues that the modern stochastic consumption model, in which impatient consumers face uninsurable labor income risk, matches Milton Friedman's (1957) original description of the Permanent Income Hypothesis much better than the perfect foresight or certainty equivalent models did. The...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...