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Report
Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017
This report draws from the Board's fifth annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) and examines the economic well-being and financial lives of Americans and their families.
Discussion Paper
Deleveraging: Is It Over and What Was It?
Anyone who has followed the commentary on consumer spending in recent years has heard a lot about household deleveraging.
Discussion Paper
The Effect of Sales-Tax Holidays on Consumer Spending
Over the past decade, many U.S. states have enacted policies that temporarily exempt consumer purchases of certain goods from state sales taxes. In this note, we investigate whether the pre-announced sales-tax holidays noticeably alter the spending behavior of consumers. Specifically, we investigate whether there are shifts in the level and/or composition of consumer spending before, during, and after these sales-tax holidays.
Discussion Paper
"Limited Attention" and Inflation Expectations of Households
In this note, we use the household-level data in the University of Michigan's Surveys of Consumers, including respondents' own changes in expectations, to document new signs that households pay limited attention to inflation developments.
Working Paper
Balance-Sheet Households and Fiscal Stimulus: Lessons from the Payroll Tax Cut and Its Expiration
Balance-sheet repair drove the response of a significant fraction of households to fiscal stimulus following the Great Recession. By combining survey, behavioral, and time-series evidence on the 2011 payroll tax cut and its expiration in 2013, this papers identifies and analyzes households who smooth debt repayment. These "balance-sheet households" are as prevalent as "permanent-income households," who smooth consumption in response to the temporary tax cut, and outnumber "constrained households," who temporarily boost spending. The asymmetric spending response of balance-sheet ...
Discussion Paper
Forecasts of Economic Activity in the Great Recession
Forecasts by the Board staff for economic activity during the Great Recession proved to be overly optimistic on some dimensions, such as GDP, and yet were appropriately pessimistic on other dimensions, such as the GDP gap (the deviation of GDP from potential output).
Discussion Paper
Why Have Americans' Income Expectations Declined So Sharply?
Data from the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers (Michigan survey) suggests that Americans' income expectations declined sharply in the 2008-09 recession and remain depressed.
Working Paper
From Transactions Data to Economic Statistics: Constructing Real-time, High-frequency, Geographic Measures of Consumer Spending
Access to timely information on consumer spending is important to economic policymakers. The Census Bureau's monthly retail trade survey is a primary source for monitoring consumer spending nationally, but it is not well suited to study localized or short-lived economic shocks. Moreover, lags in the publication of the Census estimates and subsequent, sometimes large, revisions diminish its usefulness for real-time analysis. Expanding the Census survey to include higher frequencies and subnational detail would be costly and would add substantially to respondent burden. We take an alternative ...
Working Paper
Household response to the 2008 tax rebates: survey evidence and aggregate implications
Only about one-fifth of respondents in the Reuters/University of Michigan survey report that the 2008 tax rebates led them to mostly increase spending, while over half said it would lead them to mostly pay off debt. Of those in the mostly-spend category, the response was swift, with over 80 percent reporting increasing their spending within three months of receiving their rebate. Older households, households with higher wealth and higher income, and those expecting future income growth were generally more likely to spend the rebates. A review of other surveys confirms the general pattern of ...
Report
Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2017
This report draws from the Board's fifth annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) and examines the economic well-being and financial lives of Americans and their families.