This paper summarizes the proceedings of the second Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on July 2527, 2006. These conferences are unique in featuring the collaboration of two groups of payments experts the private-sector payments industry...

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy evaluation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically disprove:...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

This paper summarizes the proceedings of the second Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on July 25-27, 2006. These conferences are unique in featuring the collaboration of two groups of payments experts - the private-sector payments...

With the widespread growth of online commerce, we observe an increasing amount of refunds on purchases. Do these refunds affect consumption differently than regular income such as salaries? This paper uses transaction-level data from a bank to examine the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of...

We study whether households can distinguish persistent from transitory income shocks, and the implications for consumption-saving behavior. We construct a novel consumption-saving model where the household must infer the persistent component of its income process from actual income realizations...

We demonstrate that interpersonal comparisons lead to "keeping up with the Joneses"-behavior. Using annual household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the causal effect of changes in reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived...

Most of the empirical literature on consumption behaviour over the last decades has focused on estimating Euler equations. However, there is now consensus that data-related problems make this approach unfruitful, especially for answering policy relevant issues. Alternatively, many papers have...

Many consumers suffer from present bias. To present-biased consumers, the long-term is a foreign country, and they are not sure that they will ever visit. If consumers suffer from present bias, there is room to rethink national policies in multiple domains. For example, regulatory mandates might...

We analytically show that a common across rich/poor individuals Stone-Geary utility function with subsistence consumption in the context of a simple two-asset portfolio-choice model is capable of qualitatively and quantitatively explaining: (i) the higher saving rates of the rich, (ii) the...