We develop an income shock classification taxonomy that classifies income changes into 9 categories based on the magnitude, direction and permamency of the income change. Using 01/2017 - 06/2022 bank transaction data of Belgian employees and workers, we apply this classification on labour income...

This paper investigates the potentially non-linear relation between households' indebtedness and their consumption between 2010 and 2014 in Belgium. To do so, we use panel data from the two waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. Unlike previous studies, we find a negative effect...

We use survey evidence on reported spending in hypothetical energy price shock scenarios to study novel features of the price elasticity of energy demand and the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) after paying the energy bill. We document several nonlinearities depending on the sign and...

We identify the population shares of poor hand-to-mouth households, wealthy hand-to-mouth households and non hand-to-mouth households in Belgium. We apply the methodology proposed by Kaplan and Violante (2014) and Kaplan, Violante and Weidner (2014) to the Belgian component of the Household...

The paper proposes an innovative framework for characterizing investors' behavior in portfolio selection. The approach is based on the realistic perspective of unknown investors' utility and incomplete information on returns distribution. Using a four-moment generalization of the Chebyshev...

I examine the effect of fiscal policy at the zero lower bound if households have preferences over safe assets (POSA) calibrated consistent with evidence on household savings behavior and individual discount rates, and empirical estimates of the effect of the supply of US government debt on...

This paper estimates a medium-scale DSGE model with search unemployment by matching model and data spectra. Price mark-up shocks emerge as the main source of business-cycle fluctuations in the euro area. Key factors in the propagation of these disturbances are a high degree of inflation...

We investigate the relevance of aggregate and consumer-specific income uncertainty for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into a consumer-specific part....

The authors provide empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We distinguish between surprise and anticipated tax changes using a timing convention. We document that pre-announced but not yet implemented tax cuts give rise to contractions in output,...

This paper complements macroeconomic indicators for macroprudential policy with information from microeconomic survey data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), to identify pockets of risk in the Belgian mortgage market. It takes into account distributional aspects of debt...