This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and … financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in … increase in U.S. household debt between the 1970s and 2007. The resulting debt increase made balance sheets more sensitive to …

across states shows that the rise in top income shares can explain almost all of the accumulation of household debt held as a … financial asset by the household sector. Since the Great Recession, the saving glut of the rich has been financing government …

We have investigated the influence of fiscal instruments, notably taxes on income and government spending, on household … consumption in two different samples and two measures of household debt to provide a comprehensive analysis of the topic. We used … government spending or reduced taxes, in the presence of high indebtedness, actually discourage household consumption compared to …

lead to indebted household demand, pushing down natural interest rates. Moreover, popular expansionary policies—such as …

portfolios, observed in the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for these countries. We then show that the … heterogeneity in household finances implies that responses of consumption to changes in the real interest rate and in house prices …

to consume (MPCs). Our main contribution is to document how MPCs vary with household characteristics and prize size, and …