On what and to what extent private households in Germany spend money varies significantly depending on employment status, income, and age. As this study based on the most current official sample survey of income and expenditure from 2013 shows, unemployed households on average spend over half of...

Rising income inequality since the 1980s in the United States has generated a substantial increase in saving by the top of the income distribution, which we call the saving glut of the rich. The saving glut of the rich has been as large as the global saving glut, and it has not been associated...

A major difficulty faced by researchers who want to study the consumption and savings behavior of households is the lack of reliable panel data on household expenditures. One possibility is to use surveys that follow the same households over time, but such data are rare and they typically have...

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 chapter reviews empirical estimates of differential income and consumption growth across individuals during recessions. Most existing studies examine the variation in income and consumption growth across individuals by sorting on ex ante or contemporaneous income or consumption levels. We...

Private consumption, i.e., spending of households, is a key economic variable. While data on private consumption are widely available on a national, aggregate level, disaggregated data on household spending are scarce, particularly in the form of a panel. To fill this gap, we make use of Swiss...

We measure the heterogeneous welfare effects of the recent inflation surge across households in the Euro Area. A simple framework illustrating the numerous channels of the transmission mechanism of surprise inflation to household welfare guides our empirical exercise. By combining micro data and...

One might expect that rising US income inequality would reduce demand growth and create a drag on the economy because higher-income groups spend a smaller share of income. But during a quarter century of rising inequality, US growth and employment were reasonably strong, by historical standards,...

There is vast literature examining how households’ income and consumption change over the life cycle. These studies, however, are usually restricted to developed economies. The main objective of this paper is to add to this literature by investigating the life cycle profiles and relative...

This paper provides an overview of the work of the Expert Group on the Joint Distribution of Income, Consumption and Wealth at Micro Level (EG ICW) set up by Eurostat and the OECD. It discusses the challenges of producing joint income, consumption and wealth estimates, assesses their quality,...