Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias, called ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias, referred to as spin, reflects the outlet's attempt to simply create a memorable story....

The focus of this paper in on the effect that changes in income and financial assets have on household consumption in the Netherlands over the period 2009-2012. The empirical evidence is based on the LISS panel, a longitudinal survey representative of the Dutch-speaking population conducted and...

Survey data show that many respondents save for retirement in unconventional retirement accounts, such as investments in real estate. In countries where retirement savings are not mandatory for self-employed, representatives of this group often report this as an argument against making...

Five years after Lehman Brothers defaulted, the Dutch consumer confidence is still very low. Based on a monthly time series analysis from 1978 onwards, we provide evidence that general economic indicators are not sufficient to explain consumer sentiment. We show that during the Great Recession...

Rational expectations and the logic of budget constraints imply that the predictability of asset returns hinges on the stability and persistence of households' ratio of saving to asset wealth, not of consumption to total wealth. This misalignment undermines the rationale for Lettau and...

Employer matching of employee 401(k) contributions can provide a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension-plan design in the United States. Using detailed administrative contribution, earnings, and pension-plan data from the Health and Retirement Study, this...

Using data for 17 OECD countries from 1983 to 2003, this paper establishes a non-linear relationship between private consumption and the level of government debt. In countries with a high level of government debt, a fiscal expansion is partly crowded out by a fall in private consumption. In...

This report analyses the portfolio behaviour of Dutch households. The study is partly based on information from a broad survey commissioned by the Nederlandsche Bank, held in March of this year. The investigation shows that risk bearing elements are becoming more and more important in households...

This paper studies the macroeconomic relevance of credit channels of monetary policy by examining the impact of the external finance premium (EFP), that may vary over the business cycle, on private consumption in Europe. A consumption model incorporates credit channels by assuming that...

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the behavior of the economy has changed in many fundamental ways over the last decades. In particular, greater financial deregulation, larger wealth accumulation, and better policies might have helped lower uncertainty about future income and lengthen...