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 literature, econometricians typically assume that household income is the sum of a random walk permanent component and a transitory component, with uncorrelated permanent and transitory shocks. Using data on realized individual incomes and individual expectations of future incomes from...

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...

The maximin criterion defines the highest utility level that can be sustained in an intergenerational equity perspective. The viability approach makes it possible to characterize all the economic trajectories sustaining a given, not necessarily maximal, utility level. In this paper, we exhibit...

We propose a simple and powerful numerical algorithm to compute the transition process in continuous-time dynamic equilibrium models with rare events. In this paper we transform the dynamic system of stochastic differential equations into a system of functional differential equations of the...

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,...

The focus of this paper is to analyze the effect that ambiguity will have on the buyer's reservation price and the value of the option to purchase the durable good with an embedded option to resell it. The agent is assumed to be risk neutral and ambiguity averse. The problem is formulated as an...