Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...

In a model calibrated to match micro- and macroeconomic evidence on household income dynamics, we show that a modest degree of heterogeneity in household preferences or beliefs is sufficient to match empirical measures of wealth inequality in the United States. The heterogeneity-augmented...

To predict the effects of the 2020 U.S. CARES act on consumption, we extend a model that matches responses of households to past consumption stimulus packages. The extension allows us to account for two novel features of the coronavirus crisis. First, during the lockdown, many types of spending...

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...

Over the past decade, productivity-adjusted wages have grown at a slower pace in Japan than in other rich countries. This paper suggests that Japan''s dualities between regular and ""nonregular"" labor market contracts and the relatively inefficient services sector have exacerbated the negative...

The Japanese economy has been hit hard by the slump in global demand for advanced manufacturing products such as cars, information technology, and machinery, which account for a larger share of production than in other G-7 economies. Most of the drop in Japan's exports was caused by a sharp...