Behavioral economics identifies myriad deviations from classical economic assumptions about consumer decision-making, but lacks evidence on how its diverse phenomena fit together and whether they are amenable to modeling as low-dimensional constructs. We pursue such parsimony on three fronts,...

This chapter traces theoretical developments on the consumption/saving function since Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes and reviews relevant contributions from the field of behavioral economics. We then propose a model of consumption where an atemporal utility function involving current...

This study examines the factors affecting household saving, extending previous research by adding measures of consumer optimism to the variables previous investigators used to analyze saving behavior. In addition to expectations about household income and the economy, we create an optimism...

This paper estimates the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption (sigma). We exploit a natural experiment provided by a change in the Indian banking legislation which authorized all the deposit collecting institutions to offer a higher interest rate on deposits to citizens above...

The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a marked contraction in US consumption spending that had hitherto been boosted by historically high levels of household debt-financing. These events question the validity of conventional models of consumption based on the life-cycle...