We examine the information content of a newly created news sentiment index from over 300,000 articles from some of the most widely read newspapers in the US to explain changes in the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1995 to 2009. Using ARMA-models, we show that consumer...

This article investigates how wealth affected household consumption in the USA in the period 1989-2007. Previous empirical results are mixed, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available. We combine information from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of...

How does household wealth influence consumption? The empirical evidence brought so far by the literature is unclear, mostly because of the low quality of the data more readily available: aggregate data, cross sections and panel datasets lacking important variables all present major shortcomings...

We study how the 1997-1998 Asian Financial Crisis affected consumption smoothing across households in Korean prefectures. The crisis caused the cross-sectional mean and volatility of household consumption to fall substantially. We show that such falls bias two standard tests towards rejecting...

We propose two simple bias reduction procedures that apply to estimators in a general static simultaneous equation model and which are valid under reatively weak distributional assumptions for the errors. Standard jackknife estimators, as applied to 2SLS, may not reduce the bias of the exogenous...

By how much do employed households reduce their consumption when the aggregate unemployment rate rises? In Spain during the Great Recession a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate was related to a strong drop in household consumption of more than 0.7% per equivalent adult. This...

We propose a new classification of consumption goods into nondurable goods, durable goods and a new class which we call "memorable" goods. A good is memorable if a consumer can draw current utility from its past consumption experience through memory. We propose a novel consumption-savings model...

We use two quasi-natural experiments, the rapid expansion of many markets after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Anti-Alcohol Campaign in 1986, and a migrants research design to identify highly persistent habits in food and alcohol consumption. Large shocks to product availability and...

"Up until now, our knowledge on the consumption patterns of recipients of Unemployment Benefit II, the means tested basic security system for employable persons in Germany, is rather restricted. This comes somewhat as a surprise, since analyses of consumption are highly relevant for setting...

We explore the reaction of heterogenous consumers to a range of financial and economic news and find asymmetry in the response to news where consumers react to bad news but not to good news. This asymmetry holds uniformly across heterogeneous consumer groups and is consistent with the popular...