Like the theory of the second best that the 2006 congress marks, the VAT is now fifty years old. Judged by the extent … and speed of its spread around the world, and the revenue that it raises, the VAT would seem to have been a remarkable … prominent of these. One is the fear (raised mainly in the United States) that the VAT actually does too good a job of raising …

State-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income to the same extent as US aggregate data, but state …-specific (idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged stste-specific income - a result that also holds for … reaction of consumption to idiosynctratic disposable income shocks even if it fails at the aggregate US level. Further analysis …

We estimate consumption dynamics in the G-7 economies, paying particular attention to the possibility of precautionary … consumption growth. As such, consumption in the G-7 economies is unlikely to be the engine that revives global growth. Differences … in the pace and timing of consumption moderation have implications for the evolution of global imbalances. With the U …

This paper presents a theoretical model of consumption behavior that synthesizes the seminal contributions of Keynes … (1936), Friedman (1956) and Duesenberry (1948). The model is labeled a “relative permanent income” theory of consumption …. The key feature is that the share of permanent income devoted to consumption is a negative function of household relative …

Simple life cycle and permanent income hypotheses imply that changes in consumption should be unforecastable. Rational … forward-looking agents ought to smooth consumption over the life cycle and exhaust the asset stock accumulated during the … review of literature focuses particularly on the life cycle issues of consumption behaviour. …

the permanent-income model that allows for nonseparability between domestic and imported goods consumption. The …