This paper studies how and why households adjust their spending, saving, and borrowing in response to transitory income shocks. We leverage new large-scale survey data to first quantitatively assess households' intertemporal marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) and deleverage (MPDs) (the...

We estimate the unconditional distribution of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) using clustering regression applied to the 2008 economic stimulus payments. By deviating from the standard approach of estimating MPC heterogeneity using interactions with observables, we can recover the full...

We consider risk sharing in rural China during its rapid economic transformation from the late 1980s through the late 2000s. We document an erosion of consumption insurance against both household-level idiosyncratic and village-level aggregate income shocks, and show that this decline is related...

Heathcote et al. (2010) conducted an empirical analysis of several dimensions of inequality in the United States over the years 1967-2006, using publicly-available survey data. This paper expands the analysis, and extends it to 2021. We find that since the early 2000s, the college wage premium...

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...

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a theoretical and empirical analysis of the nexus between long-term care insurance (LTCI), formal care, informal (family) care, and bequests. In our empirical analysis, we use micro data from the Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and...

We analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly depending on what criterion is used to rank them. For...

Households spent only a small fraction of their 2020 Economic Impact Payment (EIPs) within a couple of months of arrival, consistent with i) pandemic constraints on spending, ii) other pandemic programs and social insurance, and iii) the broader disbursement of the EIPs compared to the economic...

We study life insurance market responses to Covid-19 using unique national administrative data from Israel on purchases and cancellations of life insurance policies, and an internet survey of Americans' life insurance choices, risk attitudes, Covid-19 perceptions, and vaccination behavior. We...