Vulnerability to scarcity or to reduction of natural capital depends on defensive substitution possibilities that, in turn, are affected by the availability of other productive factors. However, in several developing countries asset distribution tends to be highly skewed. Taking into ac- count...

I study the effect of access to payday loans on the timing, level and composition of consumption. Using a newly obtained military administrative dataset of sales at on-base grocery and department stores, I examine how consumption behavior changes after the passage of a federal law that...

Micro data over the life cycle shows two different patterns of consumption of housing and non-housing goods: the consumption profile of non-housing goods is hump-shaped while the consumption profile for housing first increases monotonically and then flattens out. This paper develops a rich,...