This paper examines household consumption smoothing via variation in time spent shopping over the business cycle. Using scanner data on grocery purchases, we document how households lower the prices that they pay during downturns by increasing their coupon usage, sale purchasing, buying larger...

We provide the first direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We find that very long-run discount rates are low, much lower than implied by most economic theory. We estimate these discount...

Do increases in wealth driven by house price growth lead to changes in customer shopping and firms' price-setting behavior? We link disaggregated microdata from various sources to construct zip-code level measures of retail prices, house prices, and customer shopping. We find that there is a...

Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act in the United States. Using a unique panel data set covering over 150 million credit card accounts, we find that regulatory limits on credit card fees reduced overall borrowing costs to consumers by an annualized 2.8% of average daily...