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Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if they face liquidity constraints. However, these same households smooth consumption when making payments in other years, primarily by transferring funds among liquid accounts. Even households carrying credit card debt smooth consumption when making payments, and even highly liquid households spend out of refunds. This behavior is inconsistent with pure liquidity constraints or hand-to-mouth behavior and is most consistent with a mental accounting life-cycle model. (JEL D12, E21, G51, H24, H31)

We measure the response of household spending to the economic stimulus payments (ESPs) disbursed in mid-2008, using special questions added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey and variation arising from the randomized timing of when the payments were disbursed. We find that, on average, households spent about 12-30% (depending on the specification) of their stimulus payments on nondurable expenditures during the three-month period in which the payments were received. Further, there was also a substantial and significant increase in spending on durable goods, in particular vehicles, bringing the average total spending response to about 50-90% of the payments. Relative to research on the 2001 tax rebates, these spending responses are estimated with greater precision using the randomized timing variation. The estimated responses are substantial and significant for older, lower-income, and home-owning households. We find little evidence that the propensity to spend varies with the method of disbursement (paper check versus electronic transfer).

Under the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, most U.S. taxpayers received a tax rebate between July and September, 2001. The week in which the rebate was mailed was based on the second-to-last digit of the taxpayer's Social Security number, a digit that is effectively randomly assigned. Using special questions about the rebates added to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we exploit this historically unique experiment to measure the change in consumption expenditures caused by receipt of the rebate and to test the Permanent Income Hypothesis and related models. We find that households spent about 20-40 percent of their rebates on non-durable goods during the three-month period in which their rebates were received, and roughly another third of their rebates during the subsequent three-month period. The implied effects on aggregate consumption demand are significant. The estimated responses are largest for households with relatively low liquid wealth and low income, consistent with liquidity constraints.

This paper uses the consumption Euler equation to derive a decomposition of consumption growth into four sources. These four sources are new information, and three sources of predictable consumption growth: intertemporal substitution, changes in the preferences for consumption, and incomplete markets for consumption insurance. Using household-level data, we implement this decomposition for the average growth rate of consumption expenditures on nondurable goods in the United States from 1982 to 1997. The economic importance of precautionary saving rivals that of the real interest rate, but the relative importance of each source of movement in the volatility of consumption is not precisely measured.

U.S. stock returns are large, predictable over time, and predictable across stocks. The average return on a diversified market portfolio has averaged 8 percent per year more than the return on a short-term treasury bill. The predictability of time variation in returns is modest at high frequencies (about 10 percent of the variation in returns one quarter ahead is predictable) and quite large over longer periods (just under half of the variation in returns over five-year periods is predictable). Finally, portfolios based on the intersection of quintiles of stocks ranked by market value and by the ratio of book value to market value have differences in average annual returns across stocks of several percent per year. The natural explanation for these variations in returns is risk. But variations in consumption risk have done a poor job of explaining these differences in expected returns (see e.g., Sanford J. Grossman and Robert J. Shiller, 1981; Shiller, 1982; Lars Peter Hansen and Kenneth J. Singleton, 1983; N. Gregory Mankiw and Mat

The key implication of rational expectations and the basic life-cycle/permanent-income hypothesis: that predictable changes in income have no effect on the growth rate of consumption expenditures, is examined. This implication is important for understanding the effectiveness and optimal timing of fiscal policy, the causes and propagation of business cycles, and the effects of income fluctuations on the growth rate of the economy. Using household-level consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, whether expenditures on nondurable goods increase contemporaneously with predictable changes in Social Security tax withholding is tested. It is found that households do change their consumption expenditures in response to the predictable fluctuations in income induced by the Social Security tax system.