The interest rate at which US firms borrow funds has two features: (i) it moves in a countercyclical fashion and (ii) it is an inverted leading indicator of real economic activity: low interest rates today forecast future booms in GDP, consumption, investment, and employment. We show that a...

This paper analyzes the wealth effect on consumption in France by relying on two original household surveys. First, it provides the first estimate of the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth based on micro data for France (Enquête Patrimoine 2009, Insee): a low but significant wealth...

Advanced countries worry about the future of their pay-as-you go pension schemes and try to introduce supplementary sources for revenue following employment termination. It is thus useful to understand how the pension schemes influence households behavior regarding saving and accumulation of...

This paper combines different sources and methods (income tax data, inheritance registers, national accounts, wealth surveys) in order to deliver consistent, unified wealth distribution series for France over the 1800-2014 period. We find a large decline of the top 10% wealth share from the...

This paper shows, from the consumer budget constraint, that the consumption spending and the different components of total wealth, i.e. financial, housing and human wealths, are cointegrated and that deviations from the common trend cahy is a proxy for the consumption-wealth ratio that should...

In this paper, we analyse the effects of transitory fiscal expansions when public debt is used as liquidity by the private sector. Aggregate shocks are introduced into a tractable flexible-price, incomplete-market economy where heterogenous, infinitely-lived agents face occasionally binding...

The existence of an equity premium puzzle has been largely emphasized in the empirical literature: one observes low risky assets holding that the standard portfolio choice model (with expected and discounting utility and homothetic preferences) is not able to explain. Besides modifications of...

This paper studies the relationship between consumption and wealth based on the concept of cointegration. The analysis focuses on French data over the 1987 - 2006 period. This relationship is expressed in two ways: in terms of Marginal Propensity to Consume out of wealth (MPC) and in terms of...

Measuring an intermediation rate is a good way of capturing the importance of the role of financial intermediaries in a given economy and their position in the face of the growth in market financing. Results show a quite sizeable decline in the financial intermediation rate in France over the...

Based on Campbell and Cochrane [1999] Consumption-Based Asset Pricing Model (C)CAPM with habit formation, this paper provides empirical evidence in favor of the importance of habit persistence in asset pricing. Using U.S data, we show that the surplus consumption ratio is a strong predictor of...