This is a short survey on consumption theory. Consumption is important to both fluctuation and growth. In addition, consumption introduces some important issues involving financial markets and portfolio decisions. We will describe consumption decisions in a dynamic context. Uncertainty about...

In the quantitative macroeconomics literature, single agent models are widely used to explain ``per-adult equivalent'' data, which are obtained at the household level. In this paper we suggest a simple framework to understand the sources of bias when these models are used to make predictions for...

Although the link between household size and consumption has a strong empirical support, there is no consistent way in which demographics are dealt with in standard life-cycle models. We study the relationship between the predictions of the Single Agent model (the standard in the literature)...

In the quantitative macro literature, single agent models are heavily used to explain "per-adult equivalent" household data. In this paper, we study differences between consumption predictions from a single agent model and "adult equivalent" consumption predictions from a model where household...

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...

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we use micro data to estimate a structural life-cycle model of individuals' employment, retirement and consumption decisions....

Like many other countries, aggregate consumption constitutes a major portion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Pakistan. Consumption decisions determine savings decisions. In long term growth literature, differences in long term growth had been explained to a large extent by differences in the...

This article investigates how wealth affected household consumption in the USA in the period 1989-2007. Previous empirical results are mixed, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available. We combine information from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of...

How does household wealth influence consumption? The empirical evidence brought so far by the literature is unclear, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available: aggregate data, cross sections and panel datasets lacking important variables all present major shortcomings...