The consumption value of a durable good diminishes as it ages due to physical deterioration and consumers' preference for the new. We develop a model of consumer specialization and trade in the market for used durables based on imperfect substitutability. Imperfect substitutability across...

Aggregate consumption Euler equations fit financial asset return data poorly. But they fit the return on the capital stock well, which leads us to three empirical findings relating to the capital income tax burden. First, capital taxation drives a wedge between consumption growth and the...

This paper constructs a structural retirement model with hyperbolic preferences and uses it to estimate the effect of several potential policy changes. Estimated effects of policies are compared under hyperbolic and standard exponential preferences. Sophisticated hyperbolic discounters may...

Liquidity constraints and, more generally, imperfections in credit markets, can be extremely important for the intertemporal allocation of consumption and have received a substantial amount of attention in the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption. In the first part of the paper I...

In this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are not inconsistent with the patterns of non-durable expenditure observed in US household-level data. Our results and our approach are new in several respects. First, we use the only US micro...

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant...

We consider the invertibility of a nonparametric nonseparable demand system. Invertibility of demand is important in several contexts, including identification of demand, estimation of demand, testing of revealed preference, and economic theory requiring uniqueness of market clearing prices. We...

We consider demand systems for utility-maximizing consumers facing general budget constraints whose utilities are perturbed by additive linear shifts in marginal utilities. Budgets are required to be compact but are not required to be convex. We define demand generating functions (DGF) whose...

Economists since the days of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham have traditionally viewed consumers as driven by relentless and consistent pursuit of self-interest, with their choices in the marketplace providing all the measurements needed to reveal their preferences and assess their well-being....

The widely-used estimator of Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) produces estimates of consumer preferences from a discrete-choice demand model with random coefficients, market-level demand shocks and endogenous prices. We derive numerical theory results characterizing the properties of the nested...