This paper shows that standard empirical methods for estimating log-linearized consumption Euler equations cannot successfully uncover structural parameters like the coefficient of relative risk aversion from a dataset of simulated consumers behaving exactly according to the standard model...

This paper compares the dynamics of two general equilibrium models of endogenous growth in which agents have comparison utility In the inward-looking economy individuals care about how their consumption in the current period compares to their own consumption in the past (one way to describe this...

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

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

This paper considers several alternative explanations for the fact that households with higher levels of lifetime income have higher lifetime saving rates (Dynan Skinner and Zeldes (1996); Lillard and Karoly (1997)) The paper argues that the saving behavior or the richest households cannot be...

This paper provides derivations necessary for solving an optimal consumption problem with multiplicative habits and a CRRA 'outer' utility function either for a microeconomic problem with both labor income risk and rate-of-return risk or for a macroeoconomic representative agent model

Economists working with numerical solutions to the optimal consumption/saving problem under uncertainty have long known that there are quantitatively important interactions between liquidity constraints and precautionary saving behavior This paper provides the analytical basis for those...

This paper argues that the typical household's saving is better described by a buffer-stock version than by the traditional version of the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis (LC/PIH) model Buffer-stock behavior emerges if consumers with important income uncertainty are sufficiently impatient...

Papers in a variety of disparate literatures have recently suggested that habit formation in consumption may explain several empirical puzzles ranging from the level and cyclical variability of the equity premium (Abel (19901999); Constantinides (1990); Jermann (1998); Campbell and Cochrane...