This paper studies the direct impact of households' debt on consumption over the business cycle. We use household-level panel data for Spain, and focus on a interesting period of analysis, 2002-2017, characterized by large variations in leverage, consumption, and asset prices. We find that debt...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

This paper focuses on whether households facing economic scarcity tend to change consumption priorities as measured by the share of spending on necessity goods relative to luxury goods in a large national supermarket chain in Israel for the years 2011–2018. Based on detailed weekly revenue...

This paper examines how households adjusted their consumption behavior in response to COVID-19 infection risk during the early phase of the pandemic. We use a monthly consumption survey specifically designed by the German Statistical Office covering the second wave of COVID-19 infections from...

This report summarises the stylized facts from the fourth wave of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey, which provides household-level data collected in a harmonised way in all 19 euro area countries, as well as in the Czech Republic, Croatia and Hungary for a sample of more...

We quantify the contribution of rental income to pre- and post-government equivalent household income inequality and of housing wealth to net wealth inequality between 2002 and 2017 in Germany by means of a factor decomposition. Further, we differentiate by region types (urban vs. rural, large...

Given how controversially inequality is still being discussed by both academics and policy makers in Germany, we discuss methodological issues related to the measurement of inequalities and review the literature and empirical estimates of different forms of inequality. One important issue is the...

We study the redistributive effects of inflation combining administrative bank data with an information provision experiment during an episode of historic inflation. On average, households are well-informed about prevailing inflation and are concerned about its impact on their wealth; yet, while...

The increase in the share of the number of older people in the Polish population requires constant diagnosis of the degree of satisfying their needs. One of the ways of such assessment is the dynamic analysis of changes in the goods and services consumption. The author's research task was to...

One might expect that rising US income inequality would reduce demand growth and create a drag on the economy because higher-income groups spend a smaller share of income. But during a quarter century of rising inequality, US growth and employment were reasonably strong, by historical standards,...