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...

This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (GSOEP-IS). This motivates a laboratory...