As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer spending are of key interest to governments working to...

We analyze the impact of a temporary shock to food supply on households’ dietary choices. We use hurricane-induced closures of grocery stores, focusing on temporary closures. Results show that store closures influence households’ purchasing patterns even after the grocery store has reopened....

This paper combines several administrative data and a survey experiment to evaluate the role of lifestyle changes in influencing inflation expectations. Using data from Nielsen's Homescan Panel, as well as a leading bank in Singapore, we first document that households are upgrading across...

Many macro-economists argue that productivity is low in developing countries because of frictions that impede the adoption of modern technologies. I argue that in the retail trade sector, which employs just under twenty percent of the workforce on average, developing countries rationally choose...

This paper investigates market concentration in the US retail sector. We use store and household-level consumption micro-data from 2004-2019 to document four facts linked by a decomposition: 1) rising national concentration, 2) negligible change in regional concentration, 3) rising household...

We use Canadian home scanner data to study household food inflation rates during periods of low and high inflation. We find that during the post-pandemic surge in inflation, the actual inflation rates experienced by different households varied more widely. Low-income households faced higher...

In this paper, I analyze the causes of the prolonged slowdown of the Japanese economy in the 1990s and find that the stagnation of investment, especially private fixed investment, was the primary culprit. I then investigate the causes of the stagnation of household consumption during the 1990s...

This study investigates the rationale for issuing complex securities to retail investors. We focus on a large market of investment products targeted exclusively at households: retail structured products in Europe. We develop an economic measure of product complexity in this market via a text...

The literature reiterates the need to employ indicators that reflect the multidimensional nature of food security. In a quest to capture the multidimensional nature of food security, this study uses a novel ideal that harmonizes two food security indicators (food expenditure (FOODexp) and...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...