The purpose of this contribution is to illustrate the mechanism by which higher oil prices might lead to lower interest rates in the context of a simple model that takes into account the global external savings equilibrium. The simple model has interesting implications for how one views the huge...

In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The indicator is based on factors extracted from consumption-related search categories of the Google Trends application Insights for Search. The forecasting performance...

This article explores the aggregate effects of women's empowerment on intra- and intertemporal household choices within a Bewley-style heterogeneous agent framework to aggregate household level decisions into macroeconomic variables. Emphasis is placed on the role of attitudes towards risk and...

Using data of households approaching retirement in the U.S., I find that the Whites' median saving rates are 9 percentage points larger than the Mexican Americans' rates (ethnic gap) and than the African Americans' rates (racial gap). Two-thirds of each gap correspond to changes in asset prices...

In the USA, the share of household wealth held by the richest 1% increased from 23.5% in 1980 to 41.8% in 2012. This paper contributes to understanding the causes behind this increase. First, using an accounting decomposition, I show that more than half of the increase in the share of the top 1%...

Housing is the greatest asset held by most households, and it is an important determinant of their financing and consumption decisions. Despite the fact that measuring housing wealth is crucial for understanding households' economic behavior, this indicator is currently unavailable in Mexico due...

This paper employs a calibrated model of the US economy to analyze the boom and bust in house prices as well as the shifts in the distribution of wealth during the years around the Great Recession. We replicate the dynamics of the housing market using shocks to aggregate income, the distribution...

We use recently published long-run microdata (SCF+) to investigate generational wealth dynamics in the U.S. over the last seven decades. We document that the median wealth of people born in the first half of the 20th century increased from one ten-year birth cohort to the next. For people born...

It has been shown that higher capital taxes can have a growth-enhancing effect when combined with a revenue-compensating cut in wage taxes (Uhlig and Yanagawa 1996; European Economic Review 40, 1521-1540) or with an expansion in productivity-increasing public services (Rivas 2003; European Economic...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...