One of the basic motives for saving is the accumulation of wealth to insure future welfare. Both introspection and extant research on consumption insurance find that people face substantial risks that they do not fairly pool. In theory, the consumption and wealth accumulation of price-taking...

This paper uses data on the expenditures of households to explain movements in the average growth rate of consumption in the U.S. from the beginning of 1982 to the end of 1997. We propose and implement a decomposition of consumption growth into series representing four proximate causes. These...