This paper explores a rational economic explanation for the much discussed credit card debt puzzle. We set-up and simulate a generalization of the buffer-stock consumption model with longterm revolving debt contracts. In line with US credit card law, lenders can always deny households access to...

This paper studies consumption and savings decisions of Danish households before and during the financial crisis as well as in the more recent years characterized by negative policy rates. While all household groups decreased their consumption ratios immediately in response to the financial...

In 1960, Working noted that time aggregation of a random walk induces serial correlation in the first difference that is not present in the original series. This important contribution has been overlooked in a recent literature analyzing income and consumption in panel data. I examine Blundell,...

Consumption growth is predictable, a basic violation of the permanent-income hypothesis. This paper examines three possible explanations: rule-of-thumb behavior, in which households allow consumption to track per-period income flows rather than permanent income; habit persistence; and...

We study how homeowners' consumption responds to a negative and anticipated disposable income shock: the beginning of the amortisation period on interest-only mortgages. We identify spending behavior through an event study approach, by matching loan-level data that covers the universe of Danish...

We investigate a non-parametric method to estimating marginal propensities to consume (MPC) using regression splines. This approach complements existing methods by relaxing a number of strong requirements on the part of the theory, otherwise necessary to acquire identification. Specifically, we...

The downturn in economic activity in the U.S. that began in December 2007 (as determined by researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research) has been noticeably deeper and has already lasted considerably longer than the prior two recessions - those beginning in July 1990 and in March...

We study the trend in household income uncertainty using a novel approach that measures income uncertainty as the variance of forecast errors at each future horizon separately without imposing parametric restrictions on the underlying income shocks. We find that household income uncertainty has...

We use repeated cross-sections of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to study the effect of self-reported transitory income shocks on household food spending. The self-reported shocks in the SCF are derived from survey questions about the gap between actual and "normal" income. This approach...

Gambling behavior can serve as an informative indicator of important household heterogeneity that is difficult to observe directly in data. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive study of the consumption and personal finance of gamblers using a nationwide...