This paper quantifies the impact of borrowing constraints on consumption and earnings inequality in a life-cycle model with labor market search and endogenous human capital accumulation. I first show that following an unemployment spell, likely-constrained workers in the Survey of Income and...

This paper develops an Index of Economic Well-being (IEWB) for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 2001 which recognizes four components: Current effective per capita consumption flows; Net societal accumulation of stocks of...

In this chapter, Lars Osberg and Andrew Sharpe provide an overview of trends in a number of dimensions of economic well-being (consumption flows, stocks of wealth, income equality, and economic security) from the lens of the Index of Economic Well-being, a new composite measure of economic...

The value of human capital wealth and its return process are important to quantify in order to study consumption behavior and portfolio allocation. This paper introduces a new approach to measure the value of an economy's total human capital wealth. By assuming that the consumption to wealth...

This paper shows, from the consumer’s budget constraint, that expected future labor income growth rates and the residuals of the cointegration relation among log consumption, log asset wealth and log current labor income (summarized by the variable cay of Lettau and Ludvigson (2001a)), should...

National accountants treat as consumption all expenditure incurred in purchasing consumer durables and in forming intangible assets such as knowledge, education and good health. The case is made in this paper that the national accounts measures of saving and investment understate both the extent...

This article highlights intangible capital, management practices, and human capital as areas for future productivity research. It also stresses the importance of developing reliable productivity estimates for emerging and developing countries, and of enhancing collaboration between national...

Productive consumption enables the satisfaction of current needs and, at the same time, increases the productive potential of labour. Theoretical as well as empirical evidence suggests that productive consumption is primarily relevant to low-income countries. From the perspective of growth...

Why are some people wealth rich while others are poor? To what extent can governments affect inequality? Which instruments should they use? Answering these questions requires understanding why people save. Dynamic quantitative models of wealth inequality can help us to understand and quantify...