The paper investigates the extent to which household indebtedness suppressed consumption during the economic downturn in 2008-2009. The paper uses a unique quarterly panel dataset containing financial information on over 100,000 individuals. The dataset covers the period 2005-2011, when there...

Pissarides & Weber (1989) proposed the use of data on income and food consumption for estimating the extent of income underreporting and possibly tax evasion by the self-employed. This paper is the first to investigate the importance of the way in which self-employed households are identified....