Neste texto apresento o modelo base da abordagem teórica denominada por New Macroeconomics aplicando-o à tendência secular, aos ciclos económicos e ao crescente endividamento de Portugal. É demonstrado que i) o endividamento crescente prejudica as exportações e favorece as importações e...

This paper presents stylized facts on labor supply, income, consumption, wealth, and several measures of consumption and income inequality drawn from the 1980-2006 Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy. The SHIW provides information on consumption, income...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists''. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality,...

In this paper we analyse the importance of precautionary saving in Italy. In contrast to previous studies, we focus on two contemporaneous sources of uncertainty, income and health expenditures, to explain the presence of precautionary saving. The major changes occurred in public health care...

This paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data. A simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time. When the condition is estimated with food consumption data from the Panel Study on Income...

In this paper we consider the implications of relative consumption externalities in the Blanchard-Yaari overlapping generations framework. Unlike most of the macroeconomic literature that studies this question, the differences between agents, and, thus, in their relative position, persist in...

This paper introduces the quest for status into the Ramsey model with endogenous labor supply. We focus our attention on relative wealth preferences. In contrast to relative consumption preferences, they allow for the possibility that agents work too little in the long run, while under both...

We analyze the welfare properties of the competitive equilibrium in a capital accumulation model where individual preferences are subjected to both habit formation and consumption spillovers. We also discuss how consumption externalities and habits interact to generate an inefficient dynamic...