We estimate how much of the wealth of a sample of respondents to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics is held because some households face more income uncertainty than others. We begin by solving a theoretical model of saving, which we use to develop appropriate measures of uncertainty. We then...

This paper argues that a model in which consumers have accurate knowledge of their own idiosyncratic circumstances but `sticky expectations' about the macroeconomy can reconcile conflicting evidence about consumption dynamics from micro and macro data. Sluggish aggregate spending growth, which...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

Saving and growth are strongly positively correlated across countries. Recent empirical evidence suggests that this correlation holds largely because high growth leads to high saving, not the other way around. This evidence is difficult to reconcile with standard growth models, since...

This paper argues that the modern stochastic consumption model, in which impatient consumers face uninsurable labor income risk, matches Milton Friedman's (1957) original description of the Permanent Income Hypothesis much better than the perfect foresight or certainty equivalent models did. The...