Papers

This paper examines precautionary behavior by relating job-loss risk to household net worth. We use existing best practice and some new strategies to deal with some problematic issues inherent in this literature regarding proxying uncertainty...

As the workhorse of consumption and saving research for the past four decades, the life-cycle model has proved flexible and useful for examining a variety of questions. In a classic paper, Albert Ando and Franco Modigliani (1963 p. 56) stated a key...

Finance companies are important providers of credit to households and businesses. For households, they originate loans and leases to finance the purchase of consumer goods such as automobiles, furniture, and household appliances; they also extend personal...

Over the past ten years, millions of homeowners have taken advantage of lower mortgage interest rates and higher home values and have refinanced their mortgage loans. For many, the decision to refinance was motivated by a desire to reduce their monthly...

This paper tests for the presence of habit formation using household data. A simple model of habit formation implies a condition relating the strength of habits to the evolution of consumption over time. When the condition is estimated with food...

Using Harvard University data, the authors present an analysis of why women are less likely than men to major in economics. Contrary to common wisdom, math background explains only a limited part of the gender difference in students' decisions to major in...

Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, this paper presents a simple test that provides an explicit estimate of the parameter in the utility function that reflects the strength of the precautionary saving motive, the coefficient of relative...