The main research question of this paper is whether or not the risk of family disruption has an impact on the consumption/saving decisions of households. Although little empirical work exists in this area, often presenting indirect evidence, the theory is divided over the effect of family risk...

This paper investigates the existence and degree of variation across house holds and over time in the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) and the coefficient of relative risk aversion (RRA) that is generated by habit forming preferences. To do so, we develop a new nonlinear GMM...

One fundamental assumption of discrete choice regression is the assumption of independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). According to the IIA assumption no correlation is allowed between brands in buying experiments. As a consequence, in market simulations all remaining brands gain at the...

This paper focuses on the deeper analysis of the interaction between Country-of-Origin, QUALITY & SAFETY labels, retailer brands and individual specific data with the target of identifying the best labelling strategies for the GERMAN BEEF market. For this purpose Discrete-Choice-method was...

This paper studies the relationship between consumer incomes and ages of the durable goods consumed. At the household level, it presents evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey of a negative correlation between incomes and ages of the vehicles owned. At the aggregate level, it constructs a...

Our paper empirically considers two general hypotheses related to the literature of behavioral economics. First, we test the null hypothesis that individuals behave, on average, in a manner more consistent with the rational expectations hypothesis than with the idea of self-control in the face...

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...

In the quantitative macroeconomics literature, single agent models are widely used to explain ``per-adult equivalent'' data, which are obtained at the household level. In this paper we suggest a simple framework to understand the sources of bias when these models are used to make predictions for...

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...

Although the link between household size and consumption has a strong empirical support, there is no consistent way in which demographics are dealt with in standard life-cycle models. We study the relationship between the predictions of the Single Agent model (the standard in the literature)...