Author: Tullio Jappelli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description

Author: Tullio Jappelli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We estimate the parameters that minimize the distance between the empirical and the theoretical transition matrix of the consumption distribution. The transition matrix generated by our estimates matches remarkably well the empirical matrix, both in the aggregate and in samples stratified by education. Our estimates strongly reject the consumption insurance model and suggest that households smooth income shocks to a lesser extent than implied by the permanent income hypothesis.

Author: Orazio P. Attanasio
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumption (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 28

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Book Description
The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide an explicit test of this hypothesis. Our approach circumvents the necessity to identify a pure age profile of the cross-sectional variance of consumption and yields a well-specified statistical test. This test is applied to data from the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. The results are remarkably consistent with the restrictions implied by the theory of intertemporal consumption choices.

Author: Tullio Jappelli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199383189
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Consumption decisions are crucial determinants of business cycles and growth. Knowledge of how consumers respond to the economic environment and how they react to the risks that they encounter during the life-cycle is therefore important for evaluating stabilization policies and the effectiveness of fiscal packages implemented in response to economic downturns or financial crises. In The Economics of Consumption, Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri provide a comprehensive examination of the most important developments in the field of consumption decisions and evaluate economic models against empirical evidence. The first part of the book provides the basic ingredients of economic models of consumption decisions. The central part reviews the empirical literature on the effect of income and wealth changes on consumption and on the relevance of precautionary saving and credit market imperfections. The last chapters extend the basic framework to such important areas as bequests, leisure, lifetime uncertainty, and financial sophistication. Jappelli and Pistaferri shed light on important issues, including how consumption responds to changes in economic resources, how economic circumstances and consumers' characteristics influence behavior, and whether consumption inequality depends on income shocks and their persistence.

Author: Raj Chetty
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816036
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
"Economic research on the efficient allocation of resources has a long history. Increasingly, attention has turned to inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes, and whether individuals or children are locked in their respective places in this distribution or whether mobility is possible. Research focuses not only on measuring inequality and mobility, but on understanding its historical, economic, and social determinants, and how policies might affect these distributions. This volume explores the latest developments in our understanding of income and wealth distribution and mobility. The first section addresses observed patterns of income inequality and shifts in compensation and fluidity that drive or reinforce income inequality. The next focuses on wealth inequality, including the difficulties of defining and measuring wealth. The third section presents new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the mechanisms that sustain these patterns. A fourth set of chapters studies the mitigation of inequality, including variations in intervention strategies across time and geography. Finally, issues related to using national accounting data in comparison with survey and microdata are examined. Lack of data, particularly wealth data at the individual or household level in most countries, presents a challenge. Momentum has been building to link multiple sources of survey, administrative and other data in order to mitigate measurement problems in single sources and to provide more comprehensive data on income and wealth"--

Author: George Loewenstein
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610443667
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description
How do people decide whether to sacrifice now for a future reward or to enjoy themselves in the present? Do the future gains of putting money in a pension fund outweigh going to Hawaii for New Year's Eve? Why does a person's self-discipline one day often give way to impulsive behavior the next? Time and Decision takes up these questions with a comprehensive collection of new research on intertemporal choice, examining how people face the problem of deciding over time. Economists approach intertemporal choice by means of a model in which people discount the value of future events at a constant rate. A vacation two years from now is worth less to most people than a vacation next week. Psychologists, on the other hand, have focused on the cognitive and emotional underpinnings of intertemporal choice. Time and Decision draws from both disciplinary approaches to provide a comprehensive picture of the various layers of choice involved. Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein, and Ted O'Donoghue introduce the volume with an overview of the research on time discounting and focus on how people actually discount the future compared to the standard economic model. Alex Kacelnik discusses the crucial role that the ability to delay gratification must have played in evolution. Walter Mischel and colleagues review classic research showing that four year olds who are able to delay gratification subsequently grow up to perform better in college than their counterparts who chose instant gratification. The book also delves into the neurobiology of patience, examining the brain structures involved in the ability to withstand an impulse. Turning to the issue of self-control, Klaus Wertenbroch examines the relationship between consumption and available resources, showing, for example, how a high credit limit can lead people to overspend. Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin show how people's awareness of their self-control problems affects their decision-making. The final section of the book examines intertemporal choice with regard to health, drug addiction, dieting, marketing, savings, and public policy. All of us make important decisions every day-many of which profoundly affect the quality of our lives. Time and Decision provides a fascinating look at the complex factors involved in how and why we make our choices, so many of them short-sighted, and helps us understand more precisely this crucial human frailty.

Author: Robert S. Rycroft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317457307
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
Thoroughly classroom tested, this introductory-level text surveys what economists have to say about inequality (or income and wealth distribution), poverty, mobility - both intragenerational (within careers), and intergenerational (between generations) - and discrimination (on the basis of race, ethnicity, age, gender, and many other factors) in the United States. This text brings the undergraduate treatment of these issues up-to-date, featuring detailed, but not mathematical, examination of the economic theory underlying the analysis. There is a greater emphasis on mobility, on wealth accumulation, distribution and inheritance, and on discrimination law than in other texts. The author provides full and fair treatment of competing sides in several of the controversial issues in the field, written in such a way that instructors can use the text material to motivate a variety of classroom discussions. An Instructor's Manual featuring solutions to the end-of-chapter questions is available online to adoptors.

Author: Orley Ashenfelter
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0444534539
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1140

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Book Description
What factors affect the ways individuals participate in labor markets?New Developments and Research on Labor Markets (volume 4B) proposes answers to this and other questions on important topics of public policy. Leading labor economists demonstrate how better data and advanced experiments help them apply economic theory, yielding sharper analyses and conclusions. The combinations of these improved empirical findings with new models enable the authors of these chapters to reveal how labor economists are developing new and innovative ways to measure key parameters and test important hypotheses. - Concentrates on empirical research in specific labor markets, including those defined by age, gender, and race - Reveals how questions and answers about these markets have changed and how models measure them - Documents how conceptual models and empirical work explain important practical issues

Author: John A. Bishop
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1785609939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Volume 24 offers fresh theoretical and methodological insights into the key issues in the field of economic inequality.

Author: Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691170649
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
An essential introduction to one of the most timely and important subjects in economics International Macroeconomics presents a rigorous and theoretically elegant treatment of real-world international macroeconomic problems, incorporating the latest economic research while maintaining a microfounded, optimizing, and dynamic general equilibrium approach. This one-of-a-kind textbook introduces a basic model and applies it to fundamental questions in international economics, including the determinants of the current account in small and large economies, processes of adjustment to shocks, the determinants of the real exchange rate, the role of fixed and flexible exchange rates in models with nominal rigidities, and interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. The book confronts theoretical predictions using actual data, highlighting both the power and limits of given theories and encouraging critical thinking. Provides a rigorous and elegant treatment of fundamental questions in international macroeconomicsBrings undergraduate and master’s instruction in line with modern economic researchFollows a microfounded, optimizing, and dynamic general equilibrium approachAddresses fundamental questions in international economics, such as the role of capital controls in the presence of financial frictions and balance-of-payments crisesUses real-world data to test the predictions of theoretical modelsFeatures a wealth of exercises at the end of each chapter that challenge students to hone their theoretical skills and scrutinize the empirical relevance of modelsAccompanied by a website with lecture slides for every chapter