There have been suggestions for monetary policy to engineer higher inflation expectations to stimulate spending. We examine the relationship between expected inflation and spending attitudes using the microdata from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The impact of higher inflation expectations on...

This paper sheds new light on the interactions between business cycles and the consumption distribution. We use CEX consumption data and a factor model to characterize the cyclical dynamics of the consumption distribution. We first establish that our approach is able to closely match business...

Prices of real and financial assets fell substantially in the UK during 2008–09. The fourth wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) was in the field throughout this ‘financial crisis’. We use these data and earlier ELSA waves first to document the effect of...

This paper tries to quantitatively examine the impact of intergenerational transfers on asset inequality among Japanese households. For that purpose, we estimate an intergenerational asset transfer function with various control variables, using a unique micro dataset taken from the “Household...

The Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 not only caused severe damage to the northeastern region, but also affected millions of households beyond the disaster-stricken area. Most notably, the disaster temporarily created large excess demand for many essential goods, resulting in widespread...

This discussion paper led to a publication in the <A HREF="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268109000109">'Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization'</A>, 2009, 70(1-2), 374-388.<P> In this paper we analyze a large sample of individual responses to six lottery questions. Wederive a simultaneous estimate of risk aversion γ and the time preference discount...</p></a>

The issue of frauds through payment cards has received a great deal of attention from authorities. A large share of card frauds can be ascribed to the phenomenon of counterfeiting of debit cards, widely used payment instrument in “face-to-face” transactions. With the advent of the Single...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households’ investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

Although there has been little economic research on 'ethical consumption' in a general sense, work on its various aspects is growing. This paper reviews economic research on ethical consumption, examining both demand-and supply-side aspects. It is argued that the most promising way to see...