The permanent income hypothesis implies that, for any cohort of people, inequality in consumption and income should grow with age, a prediction that is here confirmed using data from eleven years of household survey data from the United States, twenty-two years from Great Britain, and fourteen...

This paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow, and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior. The models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not...

In the early '50s, Franco Modigliani and his student Richard Brumberg elaborated a theory of expenditure based on the idea that individuals make smart choices about how they want to spend at any age, with the only limit of the available resources in the course of their lives. Through the...

We consider two happiness puzzles. First, many studies show that only relative income matters for well-being. Yet the Gallup data for the United States and from the rest of the world show no such result, at least for life evaluation. There may be relative income effects in hedonic well-being...

The first of the Millennium Development Goals targets global poverty. The numbers that support this goal are estimated by the World Bank, and come from a worldwide count of people who live below a common international poverty line. This line, loosely referred to as the dollar-a-day line, is...

National and international statistical systems are strangely reticent on differences in price levels within countries. Nations as diverse as India and the United States publish inflation rates for different areas, but provide nothing that allows comparisons of price levels across places at a...