The permanent income hypothesis is tested on a four-quarter panel of about two thousand Japanese households for ten commodity groups. Consumption is a distributed lag function of expenditures, and the utility function is additively separable in time. Durability is defined as the persistence of...

Altruism has the well-known neutrality implication that the family's demand for commodities is invariant to the division of resources within the family. We test this by estimating Engel curves on a cross-section of Japanese extended families forming two- generation households. We find that the...

The permanent income hypothesis is tested on a four-quarter panel of about two thousand Japanese households for ten commodity groups. Consumption is a distributed lag function of expenditures, and the utility function is additively separable in time. Durability is defined as the persistence of...

We propose an empirical framework for analyzing the macroeconomic effects of quantitative easing (QE) and apply it to Japan. The framework is a regimeswitching structural vector autoregression in which the monetary policy regime, chosen by the central bank responding to economic conditions, is...

Altruism has the well-known neutrality implication that the family's demand for commodities is invariant to the division of resources within the family. We test this by estimating Engel curves on a cross-section of Japanese extended families forming two- generation households. We find that the...