In this paper we document significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures in the UK compared to the US, in spite of income paths being similar. We explore several possible causes, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths of health status,...

According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. Whereas some consumption expenditures may fall when goods are self-produced (given higher leisure after retirement), this argument applies especially to housing consumption...

Langfristig sinkende Einwohnerzahlen und die demographische Entwicklung lassen die Bedeutung Älterer für die Inlandsnachfrage in Deutschland steigen. Haushalte von älteren Personen fragen nicht grundsätzlich andere Güter und Dienste nach als Haushalte von Jüngeren, jedoch unterscheidet...

Der private Verbrauch hat sich in den letzten Jahren in der Bundesrepublik nur schwach entwickelt. Stattdessen wurde vermehrt gespart. Ein großer Teil der Haushalte - 40 Prozent - kann allerdings kein Geld zurücklegen. Sparen können vor allem die Bezieher hoher Einkommen. Die zunehmende...

The share of private consumption in gross domestic product is significant; therefore, private consumption has a great influence on economic growth, which makes it a major concept in economics. The purpose of the paper is to estimate and evaluate different forecasting models for private...

In recent decades, Zimbabwe's development record has been disappointing. In the last few years, a severe drought and the Covid-19 pandemic have added to the country's development challenges. This paper is concerned with the long-run need to find a path toward faster growth in GDP, employment,...

This paper tests whether there is evidence of compression of morbidity using data from the American Health and Retirement Study and analyzes the effects of this on the labor supply of older people. We find younger cohorts to suffer less from functional problems than older cohorts at given ages....

Using vector autoregressions on U.S. time series for 1957-1979 and 1983-2004, we find government spending shocks to have stronger effects on output, consumption, and wages in the earlier sample. We try to account for this observation within a DSGE model featuring price rigidities and limited...

We estimate the degree of ‘stickiness’ in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of auto-correlation, with a stickiness...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...