This paper examines the relationship between the growth rates of household saving, public saving, corporate saving and economic growth in India using multivariate Granger causality tests. The conventional wisdom suggests that the causality flows from saving to economic growth. We show that the...

What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

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...

This article presents a practical methodology to monitor poverty changes among microfinance clients using available household panel data. As an example, it presents an estimation of the net number of people that rose above the $1/day poverty line while members of Grameen Bank and BRAC during...

Self-esteem measures confidence in one’s abilities. Prior literature has shown that higher self-esteem can also affect individual financial decision making through an increased willingness to invest in risky assets and motivation to enhance self image through wealth accumulation. However,...

There is a consolidated empirical literature providing evidence of the fact that financial literacy, human capital, savings and stock market participation are interconnected decisions. However, to the best of our knowledge, a theoretical explanation of such connections is missing. In this paper...

A disturbing feature of the conventional objective function for intertemporal decisions under uncertainty is that the agent's attitudes toward intertemporal substitution and risk aversion are entangled. This paper shows that, in contrast to common perception, the two attitudes can be completely...

Homotheticity induces a dramatic statistical bias in the estimates of the intratemporal and intertemporal substitutions. I find potent support in favor of nonhomotheticity in aggregate consumption data, with nondurable goods being necessities and durable goods luxuries. I obtain the...

In this paper, we incorporate a price search decision into a life cycle model and differentiate consumption from expenditure. Consumers with low wealth and bad income shocks search more for cheaper prices and pay less, which makes their consumption higher than in a model without search option. A...

The aim of this paper is to gain insights from studying adaptation to natural disasters in the past in order to analyze optimal adaptation in Switzerland in the future. Most adaptation measures already undertaken in Switzerland are so-called reactive measures. They may be eective, but not...