Indicators of trust, confidence, optimism or sentiment among consumers and/or investors, are published continuously in the mass media. More importantly, these indices seem not only to reflect how the state of the real economy is perceived by private agents, but can also help predict the future...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shaped output response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies, there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) on optimal policy. In this paper we...

Price rigidity is often modeled by assuming that firms face a fixed cost of price change. However, in surveys, firms report that the main reason they wish to keep prices stable is for fear of antagonizing customers. Moreover, marketing studies show that most consumers engage in very little...

I construct a novel measure of household uncertainty based on survey data for European countries. I show that household uncertainty shocks are not universally like negative demand shocks. Notably, household uncertainty shocks are largely inflationary in Europe. These results lend support to a...

This paper generalizes the standard habit formation model to an environment in which agents form habits over individual varieties of goods as opposed to over a composite consumption good. We refer to this preference specification as 'deep habit formation'. Under deep habits, the demand function...

Indicators of trust, confidence, optimism or sentiment among consumers and/or investors, are published continuously in the mass media. More importantly, these indices seem not only to reflect how the state of the real economy is perceived by private agents, but can also help predict the future...

We estimate the degree of "stickiness" in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness...

In this paper, we first model the dynamics of an economy, making use of a simple, almost trivial circular flow analysis. Then, we demonstrate the effects of keeping up with the Jonesesʺ as well as of keeping ahead of the Smithsʺ in private consumption and the role of innovation and imitation...

This paper examines the structure and evolution of consumption and consumption growth inequality. Once heterogeneous agents relate their neighbors' consumption to their own, consumption volatility and inequality are affected. The relationship predicted between the group average consumption...

We analytically show that a common across rich/poor individuals Stone-Geary utility function with subsistence consumption in the context of a simple two-asset portfolio-choice model is capable of qualitatively and quantitatively explaining: (i) the higher saving rates of the rich, (ii) the...