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Discussion Paper
Who’s Ready to Spend? Constrained Consumption across the Income Distribution
Dam, David; Melcangi, Davide; Pilossoph, Laura; Schirmer, Will (2021-05-13)
Spending on goods and services that were constrained during the pandemic is expected to grow at a fast pace as the economy reopens. In this post, we look at detailed spending data to track which consumption categories were the most constrained by the pandemic due to social distancing. We find that, in 2019, high-income households typically spent relatively more on these pandemic-constrained goods and services. Our findings suggest that these consumers may have strongly reduced consumption during the pandemic and will likely play a crucial role in unleashing pent-up demand when pandemic ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20210513b

Working Paper
Family Job Search and Wealth: The Added Worker Effect Revisited
Garcia-Perez, J. Ignacio; Rendon, Sílvio (2020-04-30)
We propose and estimate a model of family job search and wealth accumulation with data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This dataset reveals a very asymmetric labor market for household members who share that their job finding is stimulated by their partners' job separation. We uncover a job search-theoretic basis for this added worker effect, which occurs mainly during economic downturns, but also by increased non-employment transfers. Thus, our analysis shows that the policy goal of in-creasing non-employment transfers to support a worker's job search is partially ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-17

Working Paper
Credit card utilization and consumption over the life cycle and business cycle
Schuh, Scott; Fulford, Scott L. (2017-09-01)
The revolving credit available to consumers changes substantially over the business cycle, life cycle, and for individuals. We show that debt changes at the same time as credit, so credit utilization is remarkably stable. From ages 20?40, for example, credit card limits grow by more than 700 percent, and yet utilization holds steadily at around 50 percent. We estimate a structural model of life-cycle consumption and credit use in which credit cards can be used for payments, precautionary smoothing, and life-cycle smoothing, uniting their monetary and revolving credit functions. Our estimates ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-14

Working Paper
Financial Technology and the Transmission of Monetary Policy: The Role of Social Networks
Zhou, Xiaoqing (2023-02-14)
Financial technology-based (FinTech) lending is expected to ease U.S. mortgage market frictions that have weakened the transmission of monetary policy to households. This paper establishes that social networks play a key role in consumers’ adoption of FinTech lending, which amplifies the effects of a monetary stimulus. I provide causal estimates of the network effect on FinTech adoption using county-level data. To quantify the role of FinTech lending and network spillovers in the transmission of monetary policy shocks, I build a heterogeneous-agent model with social learning. The model ...
Working Papers , Paper 2203

Discussion Paper
An Update on the Health of the U.S. Consumer
Haughwout, Andrew F.; Lee, Donghoon; Mangrum, Daniel; McCarthy, Jonathan; Melcangi, Davide; Scally, Joelle; Van der Klaauw, Wilbert (2023-10-18)
The strength of consumer spending so far this year has surprised most private forecasters. In this post, we examine the factors behind this strength and the implications for consumption in the coming quarters. First, we revisit the measurement of “excess savings” that households have accumulated since 2020, finding that the estimates of remaining excess savings are very sensitive to assumptions about measurement, estimation period, and trend type, which renders them less useful. We thus broaden the discussion to other aspects of the household balance sheet. Using data from the New York ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20231018a

Working Paper
Unequal Climate Policy in an Unequal World
Hur, Sewon; Carroll, Daniel R.; Belfiori, Elisa (2026-02-02)
We characterize optimal climate policy in an economy with heterogeneous households and non-homothetic preferences. We focus on constrained efficiency, where the planner is restricted from transferring resources across households. We derive three results. First, the constrained-optimal carbon tax is heterogeneous and progressive. Second, if restricted to a uniform tax, the optimal rate is lower than the standard Pigouvian level due to inequality. Third, this allocation can be decentralized using only uniform instruments—a carbon tax, a clean subsidy and a lump-sum transfer. In a quantitative ...
Globalization Institute Working Papers , Paper 427

Working Paper
The Welfare Costs of Business Cycles Unveiled: Measuring the Extent of Stabilization Policies
Barros, Fernando; Luduvice, Andre; Gomes, Fabio (2022-04-21)
How can we measure the welfare benefit of ongoing stabilization policies? We develop a methodology to calculate the welfare cost of business cycles taking into account that observed consumption is partially smoothed. We propose a decomposition that disentangles consumption in a mix of laissez-faire (absent policies) and riskless components. With a novel identification strategy, we estimate the span of stabilization power. Our results show that the welfare cost of total fluctuations is 11 percent of lifetime consumption, of which 82 percent is smoothed by the status quo policies, yielding a ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-14r

Working Paper
On the Distributional Effects of International Tariffs
Carroll, Daniel R.; Hur, Sewon (2023-02-13)
We provide a quantitative analysis of the distributional effects of the 2018 increase in tariffs by the US and its major trading partners. We build a trade model with incomplete asset markets and households that are heterogeneous in their age, income, wealth, and labor skill. When tariff revenues are used to reduce distortionary taxes on consumption, labor, and capital income, the average welfare loss from the trade war is equivalent to a permanent 0.1 percent reduction in consumption. Much larger welfare losses are concentrated among retirees and low-wealth households, while only wealthy ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-18R2

Report
Latent Heterogeneity in the Marginal Propensity to Consume
Melcangi, Davide; Lewis, Daniel J.; Pilossoph, Laura (2019-11-01)
We estimate the unconditional distribution of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) using clustering regression and the 2008 stimulus payments. Since we do not measure heterogeneity as the variation of MPCs with observables, we can recover the full distribution of MPCs. Households spent at least one quarter of the rebate, and individual households used rebates for different goods. While many observables are individually correlated with our estimated MPCs, these relationships disappear when tested jointly, except for nonsalary income and the average propensity to consume. Household ...
Staff Reports , Paper 902

Working Paper
The Mortgage Cash Flow Channel of Monetary Policy Transmission: A Tale of Two Countries
Cooper, Daniel H.; Garga, Vaishali; Luengo-Prado, Maria Jose (2021-08-01)
We study the mortgage cash flow channel of monetary policy transmission under fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) versus adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) regimes by comparing the United States with primarily long-term FRMs and Spain with primarily ARMs that automatically reset annually. We find a robust transmission of mortgage rate changes to spending in both countries but surprisingly a larger effect in the United States—and provide two explanations for this finding. First, there are channels of transmission other than the mortgage cash flow effect since other interest rates co-move with the mortgage ...
Working Papers , Paper 21-8

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