This paper focuses on the issue of limited financial market participation and determines a lower bound on the level of fixed transaction costs that are required to reconcile observed portfolio choices with asset returns within an isoelastic utility framework. The bound is determined from the set...

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a...

In an overlapping generations maximization framework with consumers, whose information on uncertain future income realizations is front loaded, a closed form aggregate consumption function with CRRA preferences is derived. To have a closed form solution we assume that consumers solve their...

We examine the information content of a newly created news sentiment index from over 300,000 articles from some of the most widely read newspapers in the US to explain changes in the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1995 to 2009. Using ARMA-models, we show that consumer...

I study the labor market risks associated with being self-employed. I document that the self-employed are subject to larger earnings fluctuations than employees and that they frequently transition into unemployment. Given the self-employed are not eligible to unemployment insurance, I analyze...

Various deviations from the Permanent Income consumption model with rational expectations have been discussed in the literature, including loss aversion and liquidity constraints. In the existing literature, these two types of consumption asymmetry are usually considered as mutually exclusive....

Approximately half of credit card holders in the United States regularly carry unpaid credit card debt. These so-called revolvers exhibit payment behavior that differs from that of those who repay their entire credit card balance every month. Previous literature has focused on the adoption of...

This paper summarizes the proceedings of the second Consumer Behavior and Payment Choice conference, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on July 2527, 2006. These conferences are unique in featuring the collaboration of two groups of payments experts the private-sector payments industry...

Recent research indicates that the marked increase in U.S. income inequality over the last twenty-five years has not been matched by a similar increase in consumption inequality. This paper examines the role of saving/dissaving in a house as a vehicle for consumption smoothing. Data from the...

With a novel dataset, we test whether sentiment in TV news can be used as a proxy for consumer sentiment in order to explain changes in private consumption growth in the United States. The University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment is taken to compare its explanatory power with TV...