The size of the average American household has fallen dramatically -from six in 1850 to three in 2000. To explain this … decline we model households as collections of roommates who share the costs of household public goods. If private goods are … more income elastic than public goods, as we document in the paper, an increase in income endogenously leads to smaller …

"We document a large increase in the cyclicality of the incomes of high-income households, coinciding with the rise in … their share of aggregate income. In the U.S., since top income shares began to rise rapidly in the early 1980s, incomes of … those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution have averaged 14 times average income and been 2.4 times more cyclical …