This paper proposes a model of economy with weakly non-separable preferences for both work effort and consumption. Households who derive utility from consumption of a single commodity and leisure take into account the habitual dependency of their utility on both labour supply and consumption in...

This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...

This paper proves that the income theories by Hicks and Fisher offer insufficient explanation, and that the existing measuring approaches greatly over-estimate income. Instead, it uses Keynes' definition to prove that income is actually profit. Part of the rental, wage and interest receipts is...

This study assesses the economic implications of China's changing population in the 21st century using a numerical general equilibrium model. The simulations show that lower fertility rates yield lower saving rates. Since lower fertility rates reduce the future supply of labor, capital will...

We use a life cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice to study the effects of social security on the investment decisions of households for the European case. Our model is mainly based on the one developed by Cocco, Gomes, and Maenhout (2005). We extend it by unemployment risk using...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...

This paper documents a marked increase in international consumption risk sharing throughout the recent globalization period. Unlike earlier studies that have found it difficult to document a consistent effect of financial globalization on international consumption comovements, we make use of the...

Private savings mirror consumption behavior. In Europe, the dynamic of consumption is very low, and at the same time, savings are increasing. Is this a result of macroeconomic policy? A GMM estimator is used to analyze the determinants of private saving in the EU?s 15 member states. Our main...

This paper empirically tests the validity of using only mean income as a representative variable for the whole population in the aggregate consumption relation and of assuming time-invariance of the coefficients in this relation, as done in macromodels. We use a statistical distributional...

Financial markets provide imperfect insurance of labor income risk. However, workers can partly insure against labor market risk by commuting to adjacent regions. Since commuters own wage claims to output produced in adjacent regions, the business cycle in the neighborhood becomes a relevant...