With the widespread growth of online commerce, we observe an increasing amount of refunds on purchases. Do these refunds affect consumption differently than regular income such as salaries? This paper uses transaction-level data from a bank to examine the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of...

We study determinants of households' unsecured credit limits using the Survey of Consumer Finances between 2001 and 2016. We estimate the marginal effects of demographic characteristics and financial health conditions in a two stage least squares model, resolving the endogeneity from the...

Korean Abstract: 무를 판별하는 기존의 연구와는 달리 유동성제약의 강도를 파악하는 데 초점을 맞춤으로써 소비함수 추정식의 설명력을 획기적으로 높일 수 있었다. 유동성제약의 강도는 인적자본의 현재가치를 가구별 특성의...

The prudence theory predicts that economic insecurity reduces all consumption expenditures. We question this prediction by estimating the effect of economic insecurity on various expenditure items using an Australian longitudinal data set (HILDA) and panel regressions. Our results confirm that...

This paper adopts the asymmetric error correction technique to investigate the dynamics of household consumption in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The asymmetric co-integration testing shows that households in all CEE countries but Bulgaria respond asymmetrically to negative and...

We study whether households can distinguish persistent from transitory income shocks, and the implications for consumption-saving behavior. We construct a novel consumption-saving model where the household must infer the persistent component of its income process from actual income realizations...

The "retirement saving puzzle" in the literature is the phenomenon that many households in the U.S. have significant wealth late in life, contrary to the predictions of a simple life-cycle model. In this project, we examine cross-country differences in saving behavior of retirees in order to...

Exponential-growth bias (EGB) is the tendency for individuals to partially neglect compounding of exponential growth. We develop a model wherein biased agents misperceive the intertemporal budget constraint, and derive conditions for overconsumption and dynamic inconsistency. We construct an...

The fraction of unemployed households with revolving credit more than tripled between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, and new evidence suggests that close to 20% of unemployed households use revolving credit to replace lost income while as much as 40% default in response to job loss....

We demonstrate that interpersonal comparisons lead to "keeping up with the Joneses"-behavior. Using annual household data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the causal effect of changes in reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived...