There is some concern that immigration contributes to a larger current account deficit in a net borrowing country like Australia. The reason is believed to be that the immigrants on balance have a lower net saving than those born in the country.

This paper examines the relative savings position of migrant households in West Germany, paying particular attention to differences between temporary and permanent migrants. Utilizing household level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), our findings reveal significant differences...

National borders, including the easily crossed US-Canada border, have been shown to separate markets and sustain price differences. The resulting arbitrage opportunities vary temporally with the exchange rate and cross-sectionally with travelers' distance to the border. We estimate a structural...

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...

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...

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...

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 (PSID) we specify, estimate and simulate a dynamic structural model of housing demand. Our model generalizes previous applied econometric work by incorporating realistic features of the housing market including non-convex adjustment costs from...