US households' consumption and car purchases collapsed during the Great Recession, for reasons that are still poorly understood. In this paper we use the Consumer Expenditure Survey to derive cohort and business cycle decompositions of consumption profiles. When decomposing the car expenditure...

Clearinghouses are central to our financial system after Dodd-Frank. And they will remain central even if Dodd-Frank is repealed. But clearinghouses themselves are apt to be quite fragile in times of extreme financial stress, like that experienced in 2008. And strangely Dodd-Frank only addresses...

US households’ consumption and car purchases collapsed during the Great Recession, for reasons that are still poorly understood. In this paper we use the Consumer Expenditure Survey to derive cohort and business cycle decompositions of consumption profiles. When decomposing the car expenditure...