The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...

Hypothetical questions were used with 252 students at two universities to elicit values of relative risk aversion and of the elasticity of marginal utility with respect to consumption. Conceptually, the magnitude of these two utility function parameters are plausibly similar, but there was not a...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...

The saving ratio of households in Germany has increased in the past few years when the income trend was weak. This could be due to precautionary saving. In this paper, the importance of precautionary saving against income uncertainty is analyzed empirically using micro data from the German...

Using detailed micro-data, this paper documents that households with lower income risk (and higher income levels) exhibit a higher Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) in response to transitory income shocks, all else being equal. This finding is particularly significant among unconstrained...

I show that an expansion of student loan supply affects parents' saving decisions and portfolio allocation. By exploiting policy-induced variation on expected student aid, I find a 2.2 pp increase in the parental saving rate, from 4.9% to 6.1%. The mechanism that drives this result is the...

In this paper we introduce price search decision to a life cycle model, and differentiate consumption from expenditure. The consumers with low wealth and bad income shocks search more and pay less which makes their consumption higher than a model without search option. A plausibly calibrated...

In this paper, we differentiate consumption from expenditure by incorporating price search decision into an otherwise standard life-cycle model. In our model, households can pay lower prices for the same consumption good if they allocate more time for price search. We first analytically show...

Despite the centrality of credit and debt in the financial lives of Americans, little is known about how U.S. consumers' access and utilization of credit changes in the short and long term, and how these changes are related to changes in U.S. consumers' debt. This paper uses data from the...