We present theoretical and empirical results on consumption during an enmployment spell.

England has very volatile house prices. We use pseudo-panel data spanning multiple house-price cycles over nearly forty years, to assess the extent to which house prices affect access to homeownership by age thirty, and whether differences in ownership rates persist. We find that ownership rates...

We use direct evidence on credit constraints to study their importance for household consumption growth and for welfare. We distentangle the direct effect on consumption growth of a currently binding credit constraint from the indirect effect of a potentially binding credit constraint which...

The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions. Our focus is on the sharp increase in savings rates that have been observed in the current and recent recessions. We show...