Models of microeconomic consumption (including those used in heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models) typically calibrate the size of income risk to match panel data on household income dynamics. But, for several reasons, what is measured as risk from such data may not correspond to the risk...

Credit limit variability is a crucial aspect of the consumption, savings, and debt decisions of households in the United States. Using a large panel, this paper first demonstrates that individuals gain and lose access to credit frequently and often have their credit limits reduced unexpectedly....

Building on Flavin and Nakagawa (2008), this paper models household optimal consumption and portfolio selection when consumption services are generated by both non-durable consumption and by holding a durable good housing. Housing is illiquid in that a non-convex adjustment cost must be paid...

I show that conventional estimators based on the consumption Euler equation, extensively used in studies of intertemporal consumption behavior, produce inconsistent estimates of the effect of children on consumption if potentially binding credit constraints are ignored. As a more constructive...

This paper investigates the importance of status in household consumption and financial decisions using household data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) linked to neighborhood data in the American Community Survey (ACS). We find evidence that a household's income rank — its position...

We study redistributive effects of inflation across households with varying nominal wealth positions using a randomized information experiment on clients of a large bank. On average, individuals are well informed about current levels of inflation and are concerned about its impact on their...