In the USA, the share of household wealth held by the richest 1% increased from 23.5% in 1980 to 41.8% in 2012. This paper contributes to understanding the causes behind this increase. First, using an accounting decomposition, I show that more than half of the increase in the share of the top 1%...

Currently the hottest two domestic macroeconomic issues in the United States are the dynamics of the federal funds rate (FFR) and the deterioration of income inequality. Amid the great uncertainty over the FFR, this paper attempts to predict where the FFR is bound to go in the near and...

In dem Aufsatz wird der Zusammenhang zwischen funktionaler Einkommensverteilung und Wirtschaftswachstum in Österreich, Frankreich, Deutschland, den Niederlanden, Großbritannien und den USA für den Zeitraum von 1960 bis 2005 untersucht. In Anlehnung an Bhaduri/Marglin (1990) legt die Analyse...

The paper uses a combination of micro-level datasets to document the rise of income polarization - what some have referred to as the 'hollowing out' of the income distribution - in the United States, since the 1970s. While in the initial decades more middle-income households moved up, rather...

This paper uses panel data through 2011 to examine evidence of shifts in household balance sheet behavior following the financial crisis and Great Recession. The paper considers evidence of balance sheet repair through debt repayment as well as changes in the composition of households' balance...

We analyse the effect of shocks to housing wealth and income before and after the Great Recession. We combine datasets containing information on expenditure, income, wealth and debt in a synthetic panel to understand how household indebtedness affects the response to income and wealth shocks.We...

Households spent only a small fraction of their 2020 Economic Impact Payment (EIPs) within a couple of months of arrival, consistent with i) pandemic constraints on spending, ii) other pandemic programs and social insurance, and iii) the broader disbursement of the EIPs compared to the economic...

In his widely discussed book "Fault Lines" (2010), Raghuram Rajan argues that many U.S. consumers have reacted to the decline in their relative permanent incomes since the early 1980s by reducing saving and increasing debt. This has temporarily kept private consumption and thus aggregate demand...

This paper sheds new light on the interactions between business cycles and the consumption distribution. We use Consumer Expenditure Survey data and a factor model to characterize the cyclical dynamics of the consumption distribution. We first establish that our approach is able to closely match...