Empirically analyzing household behavior usually relies on informal data preprocessing. That is, before an econometric model is estimated, observations are selected in such a way that the resulting subset of data can be assumed to be sufficiently homogeneous with respect to the specific research...

Abstract Standard economic models predict that individuals smooth consumption over the life cycle. In contrast, there exists controversial empirical evidence showing that consumption declines at retirement. This paper investigates whether there is evidence for this so-called Retirement...

Poverty is typically measured as insufficient yearly income or consumption. In practice, however, poverty is marked by seasonality, economic instability, and illiquidity across months. To capture within-year variability, we extend traditional poverty measures to include a temporal dimension....