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Report
How Do Households Respond to Income Shocks?
We use panel data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1991 to 2016 to document empirically what components of the household budget constraint change in response to shocks to household labor income, both over shorter and over longer horizons. We show that shocks to labor income are associated with negligible changes in transfers and non-labor income components, modest changes in consumption expenditures, and large changes in wealth. We then split the sample in households which do not own business or real estate wealth, and households who do. For the first group, we find ...
Working Paper
Rational but Not Prescient: Borrowing during the Fracking Boom
To study how income expectations affect borrowing, we use leased natural gas rights in Texas in the mid-2000s, which created potential for future leaseholder income without loosening credit constraints. In matching 11,000 leaseholders with non-leaseholders selected from a screened pool of 5.2 million, we find that the average leaseholder borrowed $13,000 more over the 2003–08 leasing boom. A consumption-smoothing modelindicates that leaseholders’ income expectations aligned with forecasts of persistently high natural gas prices. Yet, the unforeseeable success of fracking was associated ...