This paper explores whether habit formation in the representative agent’s preferences can explain two failures of the standard permanent income model with intertemporally separable utility: the sensitivity of consumption to lagged consumer sentiment and to predictable changes in current income...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the evolution of MiltonFriedman's permanent income hypothesis from the 1940s to 1960s, andhow it became the paradigm of modern consumption theory. Modellingunobservables, such as permanent income and permanent consumption, isa long-standing issue in...

We analyse life-cycle saving decisions when households use simple heuristics, or rules of thumb, rather than solve the underlying intertemporal optimization problem. We simulate life-cycle saving decisions using three simple rules and compute utility losses relative to the solution of the...

A new theory of interest rates, the Neo-Fisherian theory, predicts a low inflation rate due to a central bank's low interest rate. After several years of near-zero interest rate policies and low and even negative infl ation rates in the eurozone and in the US, this theory gained momentum in...