invites students to take ownership over a current issue while developing a deep understanding of monopolies. By using Smith …'s criticisms of monopolies, students will also see that economic 'truths' are complicated, even in the classic 'laissez-faire' text. …

We study the effects of oil prices on consumption across countries and U.S. states, by exploiting the time-series and … positive effects on consumption in oil-importing economies, while depressing consumption in oil-exporting economies. We also …

This paper describes the transmission of income inequality into consumption inequality and in so doing investigates the … degree of insurance to income shocks. It combines panel data on income from the PSID with consumption data from repeated CEX … found to play an important role in insuring permanent shocks. Adding durable expenditures to the consumption measure …

Recent theoretical contributions have suggested consumption externalities, or peergroup effects, as a potential … intertemporal consumption choice is a completely open question. To shed some light on the issue, we derive an extension of the … standard life-cycle model that allows for consumption externalities. The analysis is complicated by the challenge of …

consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is … consumption changes. A more important part of aggregate consumption changes is explained by the unobserved component. The …