Expenditure visibility--the extent to which a household's spending on a consumption category is noticeable to others--is measured in three new surveys, with ~3,000 telephone and online respondents. Visibility shows little change across time (ten years) and survey methods. Four different notions,...

Standard consumption models assume a notional consumption flow that does not distinguish between nondurable and durable consumption. Such notional-consumption models generate notional marginal propensities to consume (MPC). By contrast, empirical work and policy discussions often highlight...

We study the effect of welfare reform, broadly defined to include social policy changes in the 1990s, on the material well-being and expenditure patterns of poor single-mother families. Our research suggests that welfare reform did not affect total expenditures in households headed by...

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life-cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to...

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner's house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth...

In this paper we document significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures in the UK compared to the US, in spite of income paths being similar. We explore several possible causes, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths of health status,...

We use data from a sample of day care centers to estimate the relationships between cost and the quality of the child care service provided, and between revenue and quality. We use a measure of child care quality derived from an instrument designed by developmental psychologists. This measure of...

This paper uses an event study approach to estimate the effect of capital gains taxation on realizations at the state level, and then develops a framework for determining revenue-maximizing rates at the federal level. We find that the elasticity of revenues with respect to the tax rate over a...

Young firms' contribution to aggregate employment has been underwhelming. However, a similar trend is not apparent in their contribution to aggregate sales or aggregate stock market capitalization. We study the implications of the arrival of "low marginal - high average" revenue-product-of-labor...

We investigate rewards to R&D in a model where substitute ideas for innovation arrive to random recipients at random times. By foregoing investment in a current idea, society as a whole preserves an option to invest in a better idea for the same market niche, but with delay. Because successive...