While the literature has found evidence that tax rebates and economic stimulus payments increase short-term consumer spending, the literature has ignored the possibility that household labor supply may also respond. This paper exploits the randomized timing of receipt of the 2008 economic...

A well-established result in the literature is that Social Security tends to reduce steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle model...

The Great Recession and the years that followed witnessed a dramatic expansion in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits available to unemployed workers in the United States. An important motivation for this policy was to stimulate demand by transferring funds to households that...

This paper examines the early effects of dismantling the one-child (fertility) policy, which China relaxed in 2013 and eliminated prior to 2017. Birth rates, female labor force participation, and saving behavior have already changed. Between 2015 and 2017, the proportion of households with...

We use responses to survey questions in the 2010 Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth that ask consumers how much of an unexpected transitory income change they would consume. We find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 48 percent on average, and that there is substantial...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...

Using micro-level data, we document a systematic, income-related component in household income forecast errors. We show that these errors can be formalized by a modest deviation from rational expectations, where agents overestimate the persistence of their income process. We then investigate the...

The empirical effectiveness of economic policies that operate theoretically through similar channels differs substantially. We document this fact by comparing an easy-to-grasp expectations-based policy, unconventional fiscal policy, with a policy whose implications are harder to understand by...

To analyze the effectiveness of stabilization policies which includes effects on households future income it is central to account for anticipation effects on consumption. We investigate this using high-frequency spending and balance sheet data from a major Danish bank. We examine the behavior...

In this paper, we use the panel of the first two waves of the Household Finance and Consumption Survey by the European Central Bank to study housing demand of European households and evaluate potential housing market regulations in the post-crisis era. We provide a comprehensive account of the...