It is well established that consumption is “hump” shaped over an individual's lifecycle, peaking in middle age and then declining in the years that follow. Prior research has documented that consumption declines at retirement, which is inconsistent with the standard lifecycle model with...

Dybvig [1995] finds optimal spending and investment strategies for a perpetual endowment that has no tolerance for spending declines. His spending rule is a ratchet --- spending never decreases, but has a substantial chance of increasing. We find the ratchet consumption rule for an investor with...

A model of rational addiction (RA) with optimal inventories is developed and empirically tested using data on purchases in Japan. If a consumer has information regarding a future price increase, then she may hoard addictive goods; in this case, the optimal inventory period increases with the...

Higher sales tax in the home country relative to a neighboring country creates a huge incentive for consumers who live closer to the border to purchase goods across the border. Using a unique panel dataset of consumer financial transactions, we find that, when facing higher domestic sales tax,...

This study measures the effect of an increase in Japan's Value Added Tax rate on the timing of household expenditures and consumption, which do not necessarily coincide. The analysis finds that durable and storable expenditures surged in the month prior to the tax rate increase, fell sharply...

Using new panel data from a representative survey of households in the six largest euro area economies, the paper estimates the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on consumption. The panel provides, each month, household-specific indicators of the concern about finances due to Covid-19 from the first...

This paper uses Nebraska sales tax data to estimate the magnitude of cross-border shopping in response to travel cost when a local sales tax changes. The results indicate that a one percent increase in a local sales tax induces cross-border shopping by 4.81 percent in a city that has an adjacent...

We precisely geolocate more than one million mortgage choices and use a nearest-neighbor research design to find that households' refinance, lender, and loan type choices are all socially influenced by their hyperlocal neighbors. Consistent with a word-of-mouth mechanism, households moving to...

We use detailed data from a large retail panel to study the effect of participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on the composition and nutrient content of foods purchased for at-home consumption. We find that the effect of SNAP participation is small relative to the...

In evaluating surveys conducted in Thailand and Vietnam during the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that the marginal propensity to consume is significantly larger for positive than for negative income shocks. This result contradicts a prediction from the lifecycle permanent income model with...