We show that incorporating consumption commitments into a standard model of precautionary saving can complicate the usual relationship between risk and consumption. In particular, we present a model where the presence of plausible adjustment costs can cause a mean-preserving increase in...

In an influential paper, Mian, Rao and Sufi (2013) exploit geographic variation in housing supply elasticities to measure the effect of changes in the housing share of net worth on total household expenditures during the Great Recession. Their widely-cited estimates are based on proprietary...

We use panel data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1991 to 2016 to document empirically what components of the household budget constraint change in response to shocks to household labor income, both over shorter and over longer horizons. We show that shocks to labor...

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...

Many households hold little wealth, especially liquid wealth. In precautionary savings models, absent preference heterogeneity, these households should display not only higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs), but also lower average propensities to consume (APCs) and higher future...

This paper evaluates the role of redistribution in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy to consumption. Three channels affect aggregate spending when winners and losers have different marginal propensities to consume: an earnings heterogeneity channel from unequal income gains, a Fisher...

Coal heating in residential homes is an important source of indoor air pollution, leading to detrimental health effects. We conduct a randomized field experiment in northern China using three types of SMS campaigns targeting three potential biases that may hinder the adoption of electric...

According to ECB (2023) and European Systemic Risk Board (2022), Swedish owner-occupied housing (OOH) was overvalued by about 55% in 2021q2, the largest overvaluation in the EU and EEA; according to European Commission (2023c), by about 30% in 2022. These assessments affect warnings and...