Using life insurance holdings by age, sex, and marital status, we infer how individuals value consumption in different demographic stages. We estimate equivalence scales and bequest motives simultaneously within a fully specified model where agents face US demographics and save and purchase life...

This paper uses a unique panel dataset of consumer financial transactions to study how consumers respond to an exogenous unanticipated income shock. Consumption rose significantly after the fiscal policy announcement: during the ten subsequent months, for each $1 received, consumers on average...

Using data recently collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that the intergenerational correlation in expenditures is no larger than that in income, suggesting limited intra-family risk-sharing. On the other hand, even after controlling for the intergenerational correlation in...

We measure the change in household spending caused by receipt of the economic stimulus payments of 2008, using questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation from the randomized timing of disbursement. Households spent 12-30 percent (depending on specification) of their...

This paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data. A simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time. When the condition is estimated with food consumption data from the Panel Study on Income...

This paper examines the link between income and consumption inequality. We create panel data on consumption for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics using an imputation procedure based on food demand estimates from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We document a disjuncture between income and...

We assess the empirical importance of changes in income and relative prices for structural transformation in the postwar United States. We explain two natural approaches to the data: sectors may be categories of final expenditure or value added; e.g., the service sector may be the final expenditure...

We estimate how durable expenditures respond to government spending shocks at different points in the business cycle using a nonlinear VAR approach that allows for the durable multiplier to vary smoothly with the state of the economy. We find strong evidence that the aggregate durable spending...

We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations in which consumers form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information and these anticipations affect output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to changes in fundamentals (news) from those...