We study how the level and composition of household expenditures changes over the business cycle for households at different positions in the income distribution. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that transitory, state-specific increases in unemployment causes lower...

The income tax system in the United Kingdom moved from joint to independent taxation of husbands' and wives' income in 1990. One interesting aspect of independent taxation is the ability for households to choose the division of household assets between the two spouses. This tax reform therefore...

This paper examines the ability of workers nearing retirement to report their expected retirement savings, where retirement savings refers to funds held in savings, checking, and investment-type accounts. Responding to such a question is likely to be difficult, even for those who are near...

This paper examines the consumption response to the 1972 Social Security benefit increase. Nominal benefits were increased by 20 percent while annual cost of living adjustments (COLAs) were contemporaneously implemented and scheduled to begin in less than three years. Taken in isolation, this...

Previous research finds a systematic fall in consumption at retirement, even when these retirements are expected, which implies households do not behave as predicted by the lifecycle/ permanent income hypothesis. However, the worker's expected date of retirement is typically predicted using an...

While prior studies of job displacement and disability have measured the impact of these shocks in terms of lost earnings, there has been no previous research which links these permanent earnings shocks to the long-run consumption smoothing behavior of these households. Since consumption is...

Estimators that exploit an instrumental variable to correct for misclassification in a binary regressor typically assume that the misclassification rates are invariant across all values of the instrument. We show that this assumption is invalid in routine empirical settings. We derive a new...

This paper argues that, since activities that provide political information are complementary with leisure, increased labor market activity should lower turnout, but should do so least in prominent elections where information is ubiquitous. Using official county-level voting data and a variety...