Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of fiscal policy by studying, using household-level data, how households respond to shifts in government spending. Our identification strategy allows us to control for time-specific aggregate effects, such as the stance of monetary policy or the...

This paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime. We study private consumption choices focusing on former East Germany, where differential access to Western television was determined by geographic features. Using data...

In this paper we study the transmission of income shocks into nondurable consumption in the presence of durable goods. We use a standard a life-cycle model with two goods to characterize the interaction of durability of goods, durability of shocks, and borrowing constraints as determinants of...

This paper sheds new light on the interactions between business cycles and the consumption distribution. We use CEX consumption data and a factor model to characterize the cyclical dynamics of the consumption distribution. We first establish that our approach is able to closely match business...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

If some consumers are liquidity-constrained, aggregate consumption should be ‘excessively sensitive’ to credit conditions as well as to income. Moreover, the ‘excess sensitivity’ may vary over time. Using data for Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, we find a...

We characterize the open-loop and the Markov-Perfect Stackelberg equilibria for a differential game in which a cartel and a fringe extract a non-renewable resource. Both agents have stock dependent costs. The comparison of initial market shares, across different equilibria, depends on which firm...

A method of testing the relative importance for consumption of full insurance behaviour and changes in income is proposed and estimated using data across Canadian provinces. The focus of the estimation is less on whether or not the full insurance model can be rejected than on how much each of...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that homeowners are able to maintain a high level of consumption following job loss (or disability) in periods of rising local house prices while the consumption drop for homeowners who lose their job in times of lower house prices is...