The outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a marked contraction in US consumption spending that had hitherto been boosted by historically high levels of household debt-financing. These events question the validity of conventional models of consumption based on the life-cycle...

We develop a Keynesian model of aggregate consumption. Our theory emphasizes the importance of the relative income hypothesis and debt-finance for understanding household consumption behavior. It is shown that particular importance attaches to how net debtor households service their debts, and...

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In this paper, a set of simple numerical examples are used to illustrate the essence of the life cycle-permanent income hypothesis and Ricardian equivalence. The level of mathematical sophistication required of the reader is nothing more than grade school arithmetic. Since the simple Keynesian...

In the light of repeated rejections of the Hall (1978) version of the life cycle-permanent income hypothesis and other empirical puzzles, the habit formation hypothesis has increased in popularity since the 1980s. However, existing formulations of habit persistence do not always perform well...

This article models consumption and insurance decisions in a continuous-time, finite-horizon setting. We allow the consumer to acquire a "taste for the good life" by making current preferences for consumption dependent upon the individual's past consumption. The optimal consumption path is...

Empirical work regarding Intertemporal Current Account (ICA) models has centered around two distinct testing methodologies, present value tests and a productivity shock approach as formulated in Glick and Rogoff (1995). In previous work, Gruber (2001), I have tested an ICA model that allows for...

The development of the permanent income/life cycle consumption hypothesis was a key blow to Keynesian and Kaleckian economics, and, according to George Akerlof, it set the agenda for modern neoclassical macroeconomics. This paper focuses on the relationship of housing wealth to neoclassical...