We examine the household consumption response to fluctuations in income and uncertainty, exploiting a large panel dataset that spans the period of the Great Recession. The results show that after controlling for changes in realized income, both household-specific income uncertainty and local...

In the early 2000s, eight Norwegian energy producing municipalities sold up to ten years of future electricity earnings and let two brokers from Terra Securities make investments on their behalf. In the wake of the 2007 credit crash the municipalities lost up to 80 percent of their assets. This...

Uninsurable income risk is often cited as an explanation for empirical deviations from the Lifecycle/Permanent-Income Hypothesis such as the hump-shaped lifecycle profile of mean consumption. In this paper, we solve a lifecycle consumption model using a calibrated income process that matches the...

Economic policy uncertainty is proven to have an important effect on household consumption. However, the literature on its transmission mechanism and on comparing the consumption response of urban and rural households, especially in China, is limited. In this paper, we propose two channels...

We argue that the U.S. personal saving rate's long stability (1960s-1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s-2007), and recent substantial rise (2008-2011) can be interpreted using a parsimonious 'buffer stock' model of consumption in the presence of labor income uncertainty and credit...

We argue that the US personal saving rate's long stability (1960s-1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s-2007), and recent substantial rise (2008-2011) can be interpreted using a parsimonious "buffer stock" model of consumption in the presence of labor income uncertainty and credit...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

We measure the extent of consumption insurance to income shocks accounting for high-order moments of the income distribution. We derive a nonlinear consumption function, in which the extent of insurance varies with the sign and magnitude of income shocks. Using PSID data, we estimate an...