Raising real interest rates has been cited as a way to increase private saving, and thus provide the resources for growth. But this may not be a viable approach in the poorest developing countries in which most people live at subsistence level. In these situations, consumption is not very...

Exchange rate based inflation stabilization programs in developing countries often lead to an initial consumption boom followed by an eventual recession. To explain such phenomenon, theoretical models have focused on the role of intertemporal consumption substitution in response to temporary...

Many claim that fluctuations in US private savings help to create and to sustain global imbalances because of their influence on the current account deficit. To test this claim, this paper investigates the determinants of aggregate household savings using a panel of 18 developed countries for...

This article investigates how wealth and capital gains affected household consumption in the USA in the period 1989-2004. The empirical evidence brought so far by a large literature that investigates the role of wealth shocks on consumption is mixed, due to the low quality of the data more...

This article investigates how wealth affected household consumption in the USA in the period 1989-2007. Previous empirical results are mixed, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available. We combine information from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of...

How does household wealth influence consumption? The empirical evidence brought so far by the literature is unclear, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available: aggregate data, cross sections and panel datasets lacking important variables all present major shortcomings...

In this paper, we use long-run annual data to estimate the intertemporal elasticity of substitution while accounting for the intra-temporal substitution between nondurable consumption goods and durable consumption goods. We apply a two-step procedure that combines a cointegration approach to...

Exchange rate-based stabilization programs in chronic-inflation countries have often been accompanied by an initial expansion of private consumption followed by a contraction. This consumption cycle has been attributed to lack of credibility, in the sense that the public views the reduction in...