Download or read book Three Essays on Consumption Saving and Income written by Chris Carroll and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Consumption and Saving written by Kiseok Hong and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Consumption and Saving written by Robert Allen Vergun and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in the Microeconomics of Savings and Consumption written by Joshua Junshik Kim and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "Three Essays in the Microeconomics of Savings and Consumption", is comprised of three chapters which together, focus on how low-income communities and households living in the developing world make important savings and consumption decisions. The first chapter, titled "Currency Depreciations and Savings Behavior: Evidence from Household Deposits in Armenia", is co-authored with Diego Jimenez-Hernandez and Aleksandr Shirkhanyan. In this chapter, I study how households living in financially dollarized economies make currency and savings decisions following a significant currency depreciation. Those living in the developing world often face the problem of how to safely store their assets when the value of their local currency is unstable. This instability leads to several complicated decisions households must make, such as how much to save and which currencies to save in. These choices are especially important for households during periods of macroeconomic volatility such as currency depreciations. This chapter studies how households make such savings decisions following a large currency depreciation in Armenia. We exploit the unique structure of Armenian financial instruments, which generates quasi-random variation in which savers are nudged into paying attention to the depreciation. We then study how this random difference in initial attention affects the future savings choices that individuals make. Using a differences-in-differences design, we find that individuals who received a nudge to pay attention to the currency depreciation significantly reduced their total savings, held their savings for shorter periods of time, and chose to save their assets in USD. We find that these effects are strongest for individuals who predominantly saved their in the domestic currency and individuals who are less financially sophisticated. We also find that while some of the differences in savings decisions are temporary, others persist long after the original depreciation event. The second chapter, "Are High-Interest Loans Predatory? Theory and Evidence from Payday Lending", evaluates the welfare impacts of payday loans and payday lending regulation. It is often argued that consumer lending regulations can increase welfare, because high-interest loans cause "debt traps" where people borrow more than they expect or would like to in the long run. We test this using an experiment with a large payday lender. While the most inexperienced quartile of borrowers underestimate their likelihood of future borrowing, the more experienced three quartiles predict correctly on average. This finding contrasts sharply with priors we elicited from 103 payday lending and behavioral economics experts, who believed that the average borrower would be highly overoptimistic about getting out of debt. Borrowers are willing to pay a significant premium for an experimental incentive to avoid future borrowing, implying that they perceive themselves to be time-inconsistent. We combine these data with a novel sufficient statistic-based identification strategy to estimate a a structural model of time preferences and beliefs. Using our estimated parameters, we carry out a behavioral welfare evaluation of common payday lending regulations. In our model, payday loan bans unambiguously reduce welfare, and limits on repeat borrowing generate at best small welfare gains. The last chapter, "Food Labeling: Effects on Supply and Demand", studies front of package labeling regulations. Front-of-package labeling (FoPL) regulations are an increasingly popular policy used to combat obesity. FoPLs place warning stickers on food products which are deemed to be unhealthy. However, the welfare consequences of FoPL regulations are ambiguous; while firms may produce healthier foods to avoid receiving a label, they may also increase prices due to higher production costs and increased product differentiation. We study how FoPL regulations impact consumer surplus and nutritional intake in the context of Chile, which passed a nationwide regulation mandating FoPL stickers on all processed food products which surpass a threshold level of critical nutrients such as calories or sugar. Combining detailed scanner-level data from Walmart and field-collected data on products' nutritional content and consumers beliefs, we find a decrease in sugar and caloric intake by 9% and 7% respectively. We find that consumers shifted demand from labeled to unlabeled products, and this substitution is highest for products which consumers had miscalibrated nutritional beliefs about. On the supply side, we find firms bunch the nutritional composition of their products at the regulatory thresholds to avoid receiving a label. We develop and estimate a model of supply and demand for food and nutrients, and find that accounting for strategic responses from firms increases the effect of FoPL regulations on nutritional intake by 20 to 30 percent. Finally, we compare FoPL with sin taxes.

Download or read book Three Essays on Household Saving and Wealth written by Kyeongwon Yoo and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Optimal Consumption written by Henri Pages and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Macroeconomics and Finance written by David Henry Bowman and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Risk Saving and Migration in Low Income Economies written by Weiping Chen and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Smoothing Consumption Across Households and Time written by Cynthia Georgia Kinnan and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis studies two strategies that households may use to keep their consumption smooth in the face of fluctuations in income and expenses: credit (borrowing and savings) and insurance (state contingent transfers between households). The first chapter asks why insurance among households in rural Thai villages is incomplete. The second chapter analyzes the impacts of micro-credit. The third chapter examines the interaction between interpersonal insurance and access to savings. The first chapter is motivated by the observation that interpersonal insurance within villages is an important source of insurance, yet consumption, while much smoother than income, is not completely smooth. That is, insurance is incomplete. This chapter attempts to identify the cause of this incompleteness. Existing research has suggested three possibilities: limited commitment-the inability of households to commit to remain within an insurance agreement; moral hazard-the need to give households incentives to work hard; and hidden income-the inability of households to verify one another's incomes. I show that the way in which "history" matters can be used to distinguish insurance constrained by hidden income from insurance constrained by limited commitment or moral hazard. This history dependence can be tested with a simple empirical procedure: predicting current marginal utility of consumption with the first lag of marginal utility and the first lag of income, and testing the significance of the lagged income term. This test is implemented using panel data from households in rural Thailand. The results are consistent with insurance constrained by hidden income, rather than limited commitment or moral hazard. I test the robustness of this result to measurement error using instrumental variables and by testing over-identifying restrictions on the reduced form equation for consumption. I test robustness to the specification of the utility function by nonparametric ally estimating marginal utility. The results suggest that constraints arising from private information about household income should be taken into account when designing safety net and other policies. My second chapter (co-authored with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Rachel Glennerster) uses a randomized trial to analyze the impacts of micro credit in urban South India. We find that more new businesses are created in areas where a micro credit branch opens. Existing business owners increase their spending on durable goods but not non-durable consumption. Among households that did not have a business before the program began, those with high estimated propensity to start a business reduce non-durable consumption and increase spending on durables in treated areas. Those with low estimated propensity to start a business increase non-durable consumption and spend no more on durables. This suggests that some households use micro credit to pay part of the fixed cost of starting a business, some expand an existing business, and others pay off more expensive debt or borrow against future income. We find no effects on health, education, or women's empowerment. My third dissertation chapter (co-authored with Arun Chandrasekhar and Horacio Larreguy) is motivated by the observation that the ability of community members to insure one another may be significantly reduced when community members also have the ability to privately save some of their income. We conducted a laboratory experiment in rural South India to examine the impact of savings access on informal insurance. We find that transfers between players are reduced when savings is available, but that, on average, players smooth their consumption more with savings than without. We use social network data to compute social distance between pairs, and show that limited commitment constraints significantly limit insurance when risk-sharing partners are socially distant, but not when pairs are closely connected. For distant pairs, access to savings helps to smooth income risk that is not insured interpersonally.

Download or read book Keeping Up with the Medici written by Oege Dijk and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates the influence of social comparison (i.e. comparing ones outcomes with others such as neighbours, colleagues, etc) on consumption and risk-taking. The first essay (joint with Robert H. Frank and Adam S. Levine) shows how income growth of the top ranks of the income distribution can decrease overall saving rates through a so-called expenditure cascade. As the higher incomes increase their consumption, those ranked below them also increase their consumption in order not to fall behind too much, which causes those ranked below them to increase consumption as well, etc. These consumption cascades can thus lower saving rates throughout the income distribution. We provide empirical evidence for this phenomenon by showing that several proxies related to financial distress (bankruptcy rates, divorce rates, commute times) are positively associated with increases in inequality. The second essay argues shows that social comparison can induce risk-taking. It shows that with comparison convex preferences social comparison would induce both more risk taking and a preference for negatively correlated gambles. With a laboratory experiment we show that although only a third of subjects display the preference for negatively correlated outcomes typical of comparison-convex utility, those subjects take a lot more risks in a social setting, resulting in significantly higher overall risk-taking. This would both explain the puzzling amount of portfolio under-diversification among households, as well as excessive risk-taking among financial professionals in the run-up to the financial crisis. Finally, the third essay experimentally investigates whether subjects focus on rank or social distance when comparing their outcomes. In the theoretical literature both specifications have been used. No support for a social rank effect is found, but a higher social reference point is found to be positively associated with more risky choices, thus lending credibility to the social distance utility hypothesis.

Download or read book Heterogeneity and Persistence in Returns to Wealth written by Andreas Fagereng and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We provide a systematic analysis of the properties of individual returns to wealth using twelve years of population data from Norway’s administrative tax records. We document a number of novel results. First, during our sample period individuals earn markedly different average returns on their financial assets (a standard deviation of 14%) and on their net worth (a standard deviation of 8%). Second, heterogeneity in returns does not arise merely from differences in the allocation of wealth between safe and risky assets: returns are heterogeneous even within asset classes. Third, returns are positively correlated with wealth: moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the financial wealth distribution increases the return by 3 percentage points - and by 17 percentage points when the same exercise is performed for the return to net worth. Fourth, wealth returns exhibit substantial persistence over time. We argue that while this persistence partly reflects stable differences in risk exposure and assets scale, it also reflects persistent heterogeneity in sophistication and financial information, as well as entrepreneurial talent. Finally, wealth returns are (mildly) correlated across generations. We discuss the implications of these findings for several strands of the wealth inequality debate.

Download or read book Income Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior written by James S. Duesenberry and published by . This book was released on 1967 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Health and Aging written by Lauren E. W. Olsho and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Ricardian Equivalence written by Artidiatun Adji and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Due to low salaries in the formal sector, employees have been engaged in moonlighting activities, mostly in the form of self-employment (e.g., opening retail stores or services). This phenomenon may help to explain why private credit---which amounts to 29 percent of GDP---fails to explain consumption behavior. Most loans are made for investment rather than for consumption.

Download or read book Three Essays in Monetary Theory written by Ludwig van den Hauwe and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2009 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Production and Storage Under Uncertainty written by Atanu Saha and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Welfare System written by Yin-Fang Lin and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: