We document systematic and significant time variation in US lifecycle non-durable consumption profiles. Consumption profiles have consistently become flatter: differences in consumption across generations have decreased. Pooling data across different periods to identify lifecycle profiles masks...

This paper shows that the combination of habit formation - present consumption creating additional consumption needs in the future - and myopia may explain why some retirees are forced to "unretire", i.e., unexpectedly return to work. It also shows that when myopia about habit formation leads to...

It has long been argued that the anticipations of some future event will impact current consumption and well-being in advance of the occurrence of the event itself. This paper introduces this idea of anticipated pleasure into the Ramsey growth model, by assuming that in addition to his own...

How the tax system might affect the individual s educational level is well studied. But the question of how the tax system affects the individual s choice of educational type is mostly ignored. This is an important issue, since the educational choice of today s young generation determines the...

We propose an overlapping generations economy where households care about relative consumption, the difference between their consumption and the consumption of their reference group. An individual's consumption is driven by the comparison of his lifetime income and the lifetime income of his...

This paper uses data taken from the tax returns of all Icelandic taxpayers in 2005-2019, a period that saw large changes in disposable income around the country's financial crisis in 2008, to plot the life-cycle path of consumption and income for different education groups and to estimate the...

Using a representative online panel from the US, we examine how individuals' macroeconomic expectations causally affect their personal economic prospects and their behavior. To exogenously vary respondents' expectations we provide them with different professional forecasts about the likelihood...

This paper focuses on whether households facing economic scarcity tend to change consumption priorities as measured by the share of spending on necessity goods relative to luxury goods in a large national supermarket chain in Israel for the years 2011-2018. Based on detailed weekly revenue data...