Consumption is the largest component of GDP. Since the 1950s, the life cycle and the permanent income models have … constituted the main analytical tools to the study of consumption behaviour, both at the micro and at the aggregate level. Since … the literature to estimate preferences is the lack of a ‘consumption function’. A challenge for future research is to use …

register data. Results suggest that children does not affect household consumption in the same magnitude previously assumed …I show that conventional estimators based on the consumption Euler equation, extensively used in studies of … intertemporal consumption behavior, produce inconsistent estimates of the effect of children on consumption if potentially binding …