Liquidity constraints and, more generally, imperfections in credit markets, can be extremely important for the intertemporal allocation of consumption and have received a substantial amount of attention in the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption. In the first part of the paper I...

In this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are not inconsistent with the patterns of non-durable expenditure observed in US household-level data. Our results and our approach are new in several respects. First, we use the only US micro...

I study the effect of observable predictors that imperfectly predict conditional expected stock returns on optimal life-cycle consumption and portfolio choice in the presence of undiversifiable labor income risk. Investors filter the unobservable expected stock returns from realized predictive...

We investigate how early life circumstances - childhood health and socioeconomic status (SES) - are associated with labor market outcomes over an individualś entire life cycle. A life cycle approach provides insights not only into which labor market outcomes are associated with adverse...

Das Konsumverhalten privater Haushalte hat in der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Literatur seit Jahrzehnten einen hohen Stellenwert. Überwiegend dienten Stromgrößen wie das Faktoreinkommen oder der Konsum der Vorperiode als erklärende Variablen. Auf empirischer Ebene kollidiert eine solche...