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 this paper, a stochastic endogenous aggregative growth model is constructed and two main results are established, based on endogenous horizon of the economy and endogenous terminal capital stock, which is also efficient capital accumulation in some sense. First, strong turnpike theorems under...

Households who wish to extract home equity through refinancing their mortgage face a hidden transaction cost. The real value of the fixed nominal mortgage payment declines over time with inflation. The change in the real value of the mortgage payments from taking on a new mortgage is positive...

This paper derives the general equilibrium effects of rational inattention (or RI; Sims 2003, 2010) in a model of incomplete income insurance (Huggett 1993, Wang 2003). We show that, under the assumption of CARA utility with Gaussian shocks, the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) arises in...

In this paper, we examine the joint consumption-portfolio decision of an agent with limited information-processing capacity (rational inattention or RI) in the sense of Sims (2003) within a non-linear-quadratic (non-LQ) setting. Our model predicts that, as processing capacity falls, agents...

We examine the optimal consumption decisions of households in a micro-founded framework that assumes two financial frictions: heterogeneity between borrowing and saving households, and endogenous default. We study default in the context of two-period overlapping processes of consumer behavior,...

We use a life cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using...

The well-documented positive correlation between income risk and wealth was interpreted as evidence for high amounts of precautionary wealth in various studies. However, the large estimates emerged from pooling non-entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs without controlling for heterogeneity. This paper...

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of liquidity constraints and excess sensitivity in intertemporal household consumption. Using a pseudo panel that has been constructed on rich German consumption survey data, we estimate the consumption responses to permanent and transitory...

This paper extends the idea of using ex-ante risk measures in a model of precautionary savings by explicitly simulating future net-income risks. The uncertainty measure takes into account the interdependency of labour market status and health. The model is estimated for prime age males using the...