Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption “habits” to explain the substantial persistence of aggregate consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

We estimate the degree of amp;apos;stickinessamp;apos; in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a...

This paper examines the relationship between household balance sheets, consumer purchases, and expectations. We find few robust empirical relationships between balance sheet measures and spending, but we do find that unemployment expectations are robustly correlated with spending. We then...