The traditional consumption function based on the life cycle permanent income hypothesis (LC-PIH) considers that consumer spending is based on households’ expectations of their future income. However, in short-term forecasting, the traditional economic determinants of consumption do not...

This paper uses a unique survey questionnaire to assess the impact of the 2002 French tax cut on consumption. I find that the proportion of "spender" consumers as opposed to "Ricardian" consumers is relatively high, with 52.7 per cent of the households declaring that they consume their tax cuts....

In the 2001 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), 27% of households report simultaneously revolving significant credit card debt and holding sizeable amounts of liquid assets. These consumers report paying, on average, a 14% interest rate on their debt, while earning only 1 or 2% on their...

Using the Chinese urban household survey data between 1997 and 2006, we find that income inequality has a negative (positive) impact on households’ consumption (savings), even after we control for family income. We argue that people save to improve their social status when social status is...

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 the quantitative macro literature, single agent models are heavily used to explain "per-adult equivalent" household data. In this paper, we study differences between consumption predictions from a single agent model and "adult equivalent" consumption predictions from a model where household...

Appendix to the main text