This paper describes the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality and in so doing investigates the degree of insurance to income shocks. It combines panel data on income from the PSID with consumption data from repeated CEX cross-sections and distinguishes between permanent...

There is renewed interest in why people of lower socio-economic status (SES) have worse health outcomes. No matter which measures of SES are used (income, wealth, or education), the evidence that this association is large is abundant (Marmot (1999), Smith (1999)). The relation between SES and...

Recent theoretical contributions have suggested consumption externalities, or peergroup effects, as a potential explanation for some of the puzzles in macroeconomics and finance. However, the empirical relevance of peer effects for intertemporal consumption choice is a completely open question....

Recent theoretical work has shown the importance of measuring microeconomic uncertainty for models of both general and partial equilibrium under imperfect insurance. In this paper the assumption of i.i.d. income innovations used in previous empirical studies is removed and the focus of the...

This paper looks at the links between health and socio-economic status. It is generally assumed by non-economists that it is low SES that causes ill health, but this paper asks whether the causation might also work the other way. Even if the direction of causation is that SES mainly affects...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. First, it reviews existing empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules,...

This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States. The Interview sample follows survey households over four calendar quarters and consists of retrospectively asked...

The adequacy of household saving for retirement has become a policy issue all around the world. The UK and US have been in the vanguard of those countries that have tried to encourage retirement saving by providing tax-favoured treatment for particular savings accounts. We consider empirical...