Expenditure visibility--the extent to which a household's spending on a consumption category is noticeable to others--is measured in three new surveys, with ~3,000 telephone and online respondents. Visibility shows little change across time (ten years) and survey methods. Four different notions,...

This paper analyzes how the decision of when to buy a durable good affects both non-durable consumption and business cycle dynamics. At the individual level, we show that the timing of durable goods purchases plays an important role in smoothing consumption over time. In the benchmark case, the...

Classical spectral techniques can provide sharp insights into the cyclical patterns in a time series of economic data. Various problems in the application of classical spectral techniques, such as the choices of smoothing routine and bandwidth and the appearance of end-effects, inhibit the...