Purpose – The New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NRCMS), implemented in China since 2003, has greatly increased the access of the poor to health services and alleviated the hardship caused by catastrophic medical payments. Both the precautionary saving theory and the Buffer-Stock saving...

In this paper we study the relevance and mechanics of consumption network effects. We use long panel data on the entire Danish population to construct a measure of consumption based on administrative tax records, and define the peer groups in terms of workplace, occupation, education, and age....

This paper studies the heterogeneity of the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth (MPC) both across and within countries. We estimate the MPC based on a cross-country harmonized household level dataset which combines surveys on wealth, income and consumption. We use panel regressions and...

Using the data on maintenance expenditures and self-assessed house value, I separate the measure of individual housing stock and house prices, and use these data for testing whether nondurable consumption and housing are characterized by intratemporal nonseparability in households' preferences....

This article examines the phenomenon of compensative and compulsive buying in a consumer society such as Poland. The prevalence of compensative and compulsive buying in Poland is discussed in comparison with other countries. Sociodemographic conditions of compensative and compulsive buying such...

Using the data on maintenance expenditures and self-assessed house value, I separate the measure of individual housing stock and house prices, and use these data for testing whether nondurable consumption and housing are characterized by intratemporal nonseparability in households’...

We measure consumers' readiness to face emergency expenses. Based on data from a representative survey of US consumers, we find that financial readiness varies widely across consumers, with lowest-income, least-educated, unemployed, and black consumers most likely to have $0 saved for emergency...

Preferences over wealth can explain why households do not spend more when real interest rates fall, because they save more than optimal under a standard model. However, little is known about preferences over wealth empirically. We run an intentionally simple lab experiment on intertemporal...

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:...

We examine 567 estimates of habit formation from 69 studies published in peer-reviewed journals. In contrast to previous results for most fields of empirical economics, we find no publication bias in the literature. The median estimated strength of habit formation equals 0.4, but the estimates...