A central hypothesis of Child Development Accounts (CDA) suggests that savings accounts in childhood lay a foundation for connecting to mainstream banking institutions and diversifying asset portfolios in young adulthood and beyond. While children may have limited savings to invest initially,...

Economists have strong theoretical predictions about how in-kind transfer programs – such as providing vouchers for food – impact consumption. Despite the prominence of the theory, there has been little empirical work documenting actual responses to in-kind transfers. In this work, we...

Five waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), 1985-1989 including both wealth supplements, are used to construct an intertemporal budget constraint for selected single headed households. A new functional form of the dual consumer profit function rationalizing consumption, labor supply...

The intertemporal labor-supply elasticity is often a central element in macroeconomic analysis. We argue that assumptions underlying previous econometric estimates of the labor supply elasticity are inconsistent with incomplete-markets economies. In particular, if the econometrician ignores...

We study how estimators that are used to impute consumption in survey data are inconsistent due to measurement error in consumption. Previous research suggests instrumenting consumption to overcome this problem. We show that, if additional regressors are present, then instrumenting consumption...

This is paper two of four in the small-dollar children's savings account series in this issue that examines the relationship between children's small-dollar savings accounts and college enrollment and graduation. This series of papers uses different subsamples to examine three important research...