We study the role of household saving behaviour, of individual motives for saving and that of perceived liquidity constraints in 15 Euro Area countries. The empirical analysis is based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey, a new harmonized data set collecting detailed information on...

We develop a method for estimation of price reactions using unit value data which exploits the implicit links between quantity and unit value choices. This allows us to combine appealing Engel curve specifications with a model of unit value determination in a way which is consistent with demand...

Many budget surveys present the interesting features that for a wide range of goods they contain quantity information along with expenditure information, and that the geographical location of households is fairly precise. We take advantage of these features to develop a method for estimation of...

The availability of quantity information along with expenditure information in some household surveys allows the estimation of price reactions on the basis of unit values. We compare two specifications that have been proposed in this context by Deaton (1990) and Crawford et al. (1997) in order...

We revisit the alleged retirement consumption puzzle. According to the life-cycle theory, foreseeable income reductions such as those around retirement should not affect consumption. However, we first recall that given higher leisure endowments after retirement, the theory does predict a fall of...

As part of Germany’s fiscal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, parents received three payments totalling e450 per child. Randomization in the payment dates and daily scanner data allow us to identify the effects of these transfers on household spending. We find a significant but small spending...

We exploit Germany's temporary three-percentage-point VAT cut in the second half of 2020 to study the spending response to unconventional fiscal policy. We use survey and scanner data on household consumption expenditures and their perceived pass-through of the tax change into prices, and a RANK...

We follow Fuhrer (2000) in estimating via Maximum Likelihood a log-linear consumption function on UK data. In doing so we consider various habit formation assumptions. We show that a model of purely external habits as in Fuhrer (2000) fits the UK data remarkably well, and possibly in a superior...