Recent research has shown that the "spirit of capitalism"¡ªa preference for wealth itself, in addition to consumption¡ªhas important implications for growth and asset pricing. This paper explores how the spirit of capitalism affects saving and consumption behavior. We demonstrate that the...

In a recent paper [Luo, Smith, and Zou (2009)] we showed that the spirit of capitalism could in theory resolve the two fundamental anomalies of modern consumption theory, excess sensitivity and excess smoothness. However, that basic model could not plausibly explain the empirical magnitude of...