The main research question of this empirical work is whether or not globalization, in its various forms, has had an impact upon international risk sharing. The empirical literature so far has only investigated on one aspect of globalization: economic and financial integration. By decomposing...

We show that household leverage is an early and powerful predictor of the 2007 to 2009 recession. Counties in the U.S. that experienced a large increase in household leverage from 2002 to 2006 showed a sharp relative decline in durable consumption starting in the third quarter of 2006 – a full...

Economic volatility remains a fact of life in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA). Household-level shocks create large consumption fluctuations, raising the incidence of poverty. Drawing on micro-level data from South Africa and Tanzania, we examine the vulnerability to shocks across household types (e.g....

Can government spending have a large effect on private consumption and income? This paper uses a novel dataset on federal government disaster-relief spending, combined with both household and state-level consumption, income and employment data, to answer this question. My estimates show that the...

Since household consumption depends among others on income, it will be of interest to examine the change of household consumption structure due to income changes. This will be useful to supply chain management as well as policy makers. Our sample refers to Western Europe, USA and Japan during...

It is often claimed that technology improves product quality, which in turn increases consumption although the product price goes up. The question is if this still holds true at national level and especially after the outburst of the economic crisis. Present model hints a major problem that of...

This paper studies the transmission of the major shocks in the U.S. housing market in the 2000s to consumption and residential investment. Using geographically disaggregated data, I show that residential investment is more responsive to these shocks than consumption, as measured by elasticities...

Large swings in aggregate household-sector spending, especially for big ticket items such as cars and housing, have been a dominant feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the past two decades. Income and wealth inequality increased over the same period, leading some to suggest the two...

According to the permanent income/life-cycle hypothesis (PILCH), under standard preferences anticipated changes in employment status should not affect the changes in consumption. In this paper, we investigate the consumption behaviour of individuals who lose their jobs and those who find a job....

According to the permanent income/life-cycle hypothesis (PILCH), under standard preferences anticipated changes in employment status should not affect the changes in consumption. In this paper, we investigate the consumption behaviour of individuals who lose their jobs and those who find a job....