Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...

This paper presents data on Japan’s household saving rate, considers the reasons for Japan’s high household saving rate in the past and the reasons for the recent decline therein, projects future trends in Japan’s household saving rate, and consider the implications of my findings. It...

The well-documented positive correlation between income risk and wealth was interpreted as evidence for high amounts of precautionary wealth in various studies. However, the large estimates emerged from pooling non-entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs without controlling for heterogeneity. This paper...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

Since the early nineties, the Dutch tax system allows for a tax-favored form of risk free savings through employer-sponsored savings plans (ESSPs). Under some conditions and up to a certain amount, the contributions to this planare tax-deductible, and the returns as well as the withdrawals are...

This paper suggests a method for estimating the distribution of discount rates using panel data on income and wealth. Using the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing (ELSA), a representative sample of the English popularion over age 50, we general panel date on total consumption from the...

This paper investigates the co-movements of job security perceptions and household saving rates using data from the 1992 to 2010 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel. The empirical analysis reveals that higher job insecurity is generally accompanied by slightly lower saving which suggests...

In dieser Analyse schätzen wir den Einfluss von Gewohnheits-(Habits) gegenüber Vergleichsmotiven (Envy) zur Erklärung des Konsumverhaltens US-amerikanischer Haushalte. Wir verwenden Daten der seit August 2013 erhältlichen Konsumerhebungen des Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) für den...

With nominal interest rates at the zero lower bound, an important question for monetary policy is whether, as predicted in prior theoretical work, an increase in inflation expectations would boost current consumer spending. Using survey panel data for the period from April 2009 to November 2012,...

We demonstrate that upward-looking comparisons induce "keeping up with the richer Joneses"-behavior. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the effect of reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household...