The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

Despite the centrality of credit and debt in the financial lives of Americans, little is known about how U.S. consumers' access and utilization of credit changes in the short and long term, and how these changes are related to changes in U.S. consumers' debt. This paper uses data from the...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...

Despite the centrality of credit and debt in the financial lives of Americans, little is known about how U.S. consumers' access and utilization of credit changes in the short and long term, and how these changes are related to changes in U.S. consumers' debt. This paper uses data from the...

This paper examines an unconventional, but potentially effective, new fiscal policy tool that can increase saving during good times and increase spending during bad times -- a cyclical matching rate on contributions to retirement savings accounts. The combination of matching rates and matching...

This paper studies the incentive costs of housing booms. We use the type and actual time stamps of 9.3 million credit card transactions by over 200,000 cardholders from a large commercial bank to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. After positive shocks to house prices, employees...

We explore the dynamics of demand for n designs of a good when agents have preferences for (anti-)conformity. Agents differ in their social status and each agent seeks to imitate those of higher status and to distinguish herself from those of lower status, relative to her own status. In each...

The Great Recession and the years that followed witnessed a dramatic expansion in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits available to unemployed workers in the United States. An important motivation for this policy was to stimulate demand by transferring funds to households that...

In this paper we construct a stochastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households are subject to aggregate shocks that affect both wages and asset prices. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify how the welfare costs of severe recessions are distributed...