American households have received a triple dose of bad news since the beginning of the current recession: The greatest collapse in asset values since the Great Depression, a sharp tightening in credit availability, and a large increase in unemployment risk. We present measures of the size of...

In this paper, I conduct an analysis of consumption and saving behavior in Japan, looking both at trends over time and comparisons with the other industrialized countries. I find that some of the conventional wisdoms (that the Japanese are asset-rich and hold conservative portfolios) still hold...

We explore how fiscal consolidations affect private sector confidence, a possible channel for the fiscal transmission that has received particular attention recently as a result of governments embarking on austerity trajectories in the aftermath of the crisis. Panel regressions based on the...

Worldwide, people are gaining access to a formal bank account, which allows account-based instead of cash payments. Based on a novel randomized control trial, we document that the payment method is an important determinant of savings behavior. In rural India, we study the effect on savings of...

How people perceive and forecast inflation has the potential to impact on a range of economic outcomes. We reveal large, systematic overestimation of inflation by Irish consumers, which varies by social group. In contrast to previous work in this area, our models suggest the upward bias and the...

Households' savings increased significantly during the first wave of the corona pandemic in Denmark and several other countries. This Economic Memo finds that the higher savings in Denmark were driven by restrictions rather than precautionary consumers. Precautionary savings have so far been...

This PhD dissertation consists of four self-contained chapters. The first two chapters study how the design of public pension systems affect individuals' behavior. The first chapter studies how pension eligibility ages impact the retirement behavior of couples. The second chapter explores how...

Die Inflationsrate hat im Euroraum zuletzt einen Höchstwert erreicht. Neben der amtlich gemessenen Inflationsrate wurde die subjektive Inflationswahrnehmung hingegen wenig beachtet. Dieser Beitrag füllt diese Lücke, indem auf Grundlage einer repräsentativen Befragung die subjektive...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...