This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of ‘wealth effects?on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as ‘habits?in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run...

We investigate for 26 OECD economies if their current account imbalances are driven by stochastic trends. Standard ADF results are contrasted with tests accounting for the bounded support of the current account. Neglecting the latter feature might give misleading results in the sense that ADF...

This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of 'wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as 'habits' in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run...

The 'saving for a rainy day' hypothesis implies that households' saving decisions reflect that they can (rationally) predict future income declines. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers and it holds under the null that the...

One of the consequences of the euro changeover in 2002 was that for a period of several years people considerably overestimated actual inflation. The goal of this paper is to study whether misperceptions of this kind may have real effects, that is, whether they induce people to alter their...

This paper presents new econometric specifications for the quarterly behavior of the aggregate consumption of Brazilian households in the 1995-2009 period. It is argued, in particular, that the use of quarterly measures of both private disposable income (in chained 1995 prices) and the credit...

Mehr als die Hälfte des Bruttoinlandsprodukts im Euroraum wird für den privaten Verbrauch verwendet. Daher kommt der Genauigkeit von Konsumprognosen eine besondere Bedeutung zu. Da der Konsum maßgeblich von den Stimmungen der Akteure beeinflusst wird, weist die Europäische Kommission...

I investigate the effect of wealth on consumption in a new dataset with financial and housing wealth from 16 countries. The baseline estimation method based on the sluggishness of consumption growth implies that the eventual (long-run) marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth is 5...

The financial crisis has highlighted the need for models that can identify counterparty risk exposures and shock transmission processes at the systemic level. We use the euro area financial accounts (flow of funds) data to construct a sector-level network of bilateral balance sheet exposures and...

This paper presents a simple new method for measuring `wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the stickiness of consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption `habits') to distinguish between immediate and eventual wealth effects. In U.S. data, we...