In diesem Jahr wurde der in Princeton lehrende, britisch-amerikanische Ökonom Angus Deaton mit dem Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften ausgezeichnet. Es werden damit - wie es in der offiziellen Verlautbarung des Nobelpreiskomitees heißt - seine Analysen von Konsum, Armut und Wohlfahrt...

Monetary gifts in the form of a gift card can lead one to spend and conceive of these funds differently than if the gift is given as cash. Across four experiments, the presentation of a gift card rather than cash led to both intended and actual spending beyond the amount of the original gift,...

Household debt rose sharply in the United Kingdom in the decade before the financial crisis. This paper uses household level microdata to investigate the relationship between mortgage debt and consumption. We find evidence that more highly indebted groups of households made larger cuts in...

The credit crisis has revealed economic inequalities across the world, yet it has emphasized transitions in the way middle class and working class people have handled wealth and consumption. This has mostly been focused in the press on changes in home ownership but has had dramatic effects in...

This study sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment surveys, and the expectations derived from them, are relevant to forecasting economic growth and stock returns, and whether they contain information that is orthogonal to macroeconomic and financial data. I examine 16...

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how regulatory focus theory, a theory of motivation and self-regulation, can be drawn upon to explain a variety of consumer decision making phenomena. We briefly review the major tenets of the theory, which proposes a fundamental distinction between two...

We study the optimal consumption behavior under the set of assumptions associated with the permanent income hypothesis: quadratic utility function, discount rate equal to the interest rate. We modify the condition that savings be equal to zero at infinity, and show that the simple linear...

Modern macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind economic actions by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. This analytical approach requires that incentives of the poor and the rich are strictly aligned. In empirical analysis a...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy evaluation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically disprove:...