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Australian regulations strictly limit early withdrawals from retirement plan accounts. However, in 2020, the Government made otherwise illiquid plan balances temporarily liquid, offering emergency relief during the pandemic. The COVID-19 Early Release Scheme allowed participants in financial hardship easy access to up to $A20,000 of savings over two rounds. We use administrative and survey data from a large retirement plan to describe how and why participants withdrew savings under the scheme. A majority report that they needed the money immediately but around one quarter said they anticipated future needs. Most thought about the decision for less than a week, acted soon after each round opened, and withdrew as much as they could. Many people did not estimate, or appear to have mis-estimated, the impact the withdrawal could have on their retirement savings. Our findings offer insights into preferences for liquidity. They also raise questions about whether the features of the early release scheme, and their implied endorsement by the Government, influenced some withdrawers more than personal deliberations over financial welfare.

I study a consumption-saving model in which consumers neglect the opportunity costs and experience a pain of paying that is decreasing and convex in the budget. The spending response to a transitory income shock can be sizable, even for liquid consumers. It is stronger for consumers with a smaller budget and for smaller income shocks. The estimated model yields predictions that are quantitatively close to the spending responses of Norwegian lottery winners (Fagereng et al., 2021). I also explore the implications of the model for asymmetric consumption smoothing, dynamic spending responses, and the age profiles of consumption and wealth.

The real-world insurance markets show that the experience of having an accident increases insurance purchases in the next period relative to insurance purchases when in the immediately prior period there was no accident. There have been several explanations put forward to explain such behaviour, with the leading explanation involving probability updating. In the present paper, using a simple two-period model of intertemporal insurance, we posit a second reason for the effect based upon decreasing absolute risk aversion and consumption smoothing. We argue that under the assumption that the insured has access to a mechanism of savings and loans, then any two consecutive periods of insurance become inter-dependent, whereas without savings they are independent. Our findings show that savings as a consumption smoothing mechanism leads to post-accident insurance being significantly greater than post-no-accident insurance.

We study a dynamic public capital accumulation model with infinitely-lived agents who follow the standard discounted utility model in their roles as consumers and voters. Saving policies are determined sequentially, period-by-period, by majority voting. When there is discounting heterogeneity, but no heterogeneity in consumption smoothing, a unique and Pareto-efficient recursive median-voter equilibrium exists. Although equilibrium need not always exist when agents are heterogeneous in both dimensions, we show its existence and Pareto-efficiency when agents' preferences are in the CES family.

This paper documents extensive commitment to mandatory debt repayment. In a natural experiment in which households can apply for free mortgage-payment flexibility for one to twelve months, 43 percent of applicants choose a dominated option of short flexibility. I argue that short flexibility fulfills a desire for partial commitment due to self-control problems because (i) applying for short flexibility correlates with other commitment strategies to increase savings and (ii) consumption drops discontinuously at the predictable end of flexibility. This desire for commitment can reduce the potency of debt-forbearance offers in recessions and contribute to asset illiquidity.

We incorporate the division of income between capital and labor into analysis on the relationship between inequality and growth. Using historical data, we document that changes in the top 1 % income shares are positively associated with subsequent growth of per capita GDP when the capital share of income is low, whereas under high capital share, the association is negative. We show that these findings are compatible with a theoretical analysis that emphasises how changes in the distribution of income translate into the accumulation of capital and overall economic activity through the interplay between precautionary saving motives and consumption smoothing. We also investigate how accounting for financial frictions affects our main findings.

Using an administrative dataset covering 2 million job loss events we analyze the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on spending from 2008 to 2020. We find that during the Great Recession spending cuts after job loss were deeper than in the subsequent expansion, but in the COVID-19 recession spending increased after job loss for many, as government stimulus supported demand amid sharp declines in overall spending. Households’ tendency to spend out of income after job loss—their marginal propensity to consume (MPC)—has been fairly consistent over varying economic environments from 2008 to 2020. That said, across economic environments, there are large and consistent household-level differences in marginal propensity to consume. Specifically, following job loss, families with lower liquidity exhibit larger declines in spending in the face of income declines. In addition, Black and Latinx households cut their spending to a greater extent than White families after job loss, partially explained by their lower cash buffers and indicators of wealth. For policy, the findings suggest that countercyclical UI benefit levels are likely to be an effective means of stabilizing demand. Additional measures to target income supports with consideration to wealth inequality and racial equity can limit the welfare costs of job loss.

Optimal tax models, starting from Ramsey (1927), are often studied using a single government. However, there are several countries which are federations and in that multiple levels of government have fiscal authority, which masks the heterogeneity across states. In this paper we study a federation with two states and a federal government. We first find that the optimal tax design indicates tax smoothing across the states and consumption smoothing across states and time. Moreover, optimal consumption is found to be independent of the tax rates. We also find that all governments cannot have zero borrowing simultaneously. Then we characterize two equilibria, one where both federal and state governments impose taxes and two, where only the federal government imposes tax. We find that in the first equilibrium, states potentially impose different tax rates, but consumption across states are the same. In an equilibrium with a single federal tax, consumption is smooth across time, but may not be equal across states. However, aggregate consumption in the economy is greater in the second equilibrium. India has adopted a nationwide GST system, moving away from multiple taxation. So, we then calibrate the model to Indian data and find the revenue neutral tax rates. We find that the highest revenue neutral tax rate is 20.1% and the median rate is 11.4%. Using the calibrated indirect tax rates in a regression analysis, we find that tax rates at the state level is negatively related to the growth rate of the state. So, after the implementation of GST in India, some states may see a higher level of consumption tax rate in the state and hence, a fall in growth rate.

Planning for retirement and subsequent execution of the plan are difficult, but essential for financial security in old age. To formally analyse the interplay between planning and self-control, I introduce cognitive costs of formulating a plan into the two-system model of impulse control. The resulting possibility of rational inaction in pension choices allows to account for a range of robustly observed behaviours. The model indicates that although automatic enrolment into private pensions raises participation (the `default option effect'), its impact on aggregate savings remains ambiguous as some individuals are `forced' to save, while others become `discouraged' and adhere to possibly low default contribution rates. Due to the same mechanism, automatic enrolment reduces cross-agent variation in wealth accumulation. A simple calibration of the model to the UK data shows that while automatic enrolment can increase aggregate savings, its impact on welfare is limited because age-independent contribution rates are suboptimal from the perspective of life-cycle consumption smoothing. Importantly, the effects on savings and welfare are highly heterogeneous across income categories.

Labor market frictions are crucial for the equity premium in production economies. A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with recursive utility, search frictions, and capital accumulation yields a high equity premium of 4.26% per annum, a stock market volatility of 11.8%, and a low average interest rate of 1.59%, while simultaneously retaining plausible business cycle dynamics. The equity premium and stock market volatility are strongly countercyclical, while the interest rate and consumption growth are largely unpredictable. Because of wage inertia, dividends are procyclical despite consumption smoothing via capital investment. The welfare cost of business cycles is huge, 29%. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

This study considers an under-explored channel through which credit-constrained house- holds may smooth consumption – buying ahead. We employ a differences-in-differences-in- differences strategy and exploit variation from state tax laws introduced in different states in different years. Using toilet paper as an example of a widely bought, necessary and storable product, we compare how households’ purchasing behavior changes in response to transitory income from tax refunds. We find that households increase the amount of toilet paper purchased by around 20% in response to a state income tax refund, but do not increase the purchased quantity of perishables. The inter-purchase time for toilet paper also increases, ruling out that households are simply increasing consumption in response to more income. Finally, households increase expenditures on toilet paper only by 11%, indicating that they are saving per unit by buying in larger quantities. Buying ahead appears to allow households to smooth consumption by purchasing a stockpile of non-perishable, necessary goods that they can slowly consume over time.

The Lucas (1978) Tree Model lies at the heart of modern macro-finance. At its core, it provides an analysis of the equilibrium price of a long-lived asset in an exchange economy where consumption is the objective, and the sole purpose of the asset is to smooth consumption through time. Experimental tests of the model are mainly confined to Crockett et al (2018), Asparouhova et al (2016) and Halim et al (2016), all of them using a particular instantiation of the Lucas Model. Here we adopt a different instantiation to the first two, extending their analyses from a two-period oscillating world to a three-period cyclical world; this is partly to test the robustness of their results. We also go one step further, and compare this solution (to a consumption-smoothing problem), in which consumption claims are traded via the long-lived asset, with the alternative solution provided by a market, in which agents can directly trade (short-lived) consumption claims between periods. We find that the latter exchange economy is more efficient in encouraging consumption smoothing than the economy with the long-lived asset. We find evidence of uncompetitive trading in both markets.

We study repayment and delinquency in an innovative loan contract that offers borrowers a wide range of flexibility. Using a large administrative dataset, we perform unsupervised pattern analysis to study how borrowers repay within the framework of this loan. We identify eight clusters that can be grouped into three distinct repayment types. We show that borrowers with fluctuating incomes and limited consumption smoothing resources use the loan’s flexibility more and that farmers in particular adjust their repayment to cash flow. Finally, we show that high use of the loan’s flexibility is associated with repayment difficulties, yet typically does not result in eventual default; whereas borrowers who face repayment difficulties that are likely driven by economic shocks face a high probability of default.

This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household’s preference for sons coincides with adverse agricultural productivity shocks, previous research shows that households tend to disproportionately reduce investments (prenatal and postnatal) in their female children. This behavior leads to a relatively more balanced sex ratio in good rainfall years and a more skewed sex ratio (in favor of boys) in low rainfall years. In a deviation from past work, we find evidence of this effect primarily through prenatal channels in modern India. More importantly, we show that a workfare program that decouples both wages and consumption from rainfall attenuates the relationship between rainfall and the infant sex ratio. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we find that the program could have saved at least 0.7 million girls – relative to boys – if the government had implemented it from 2001 to 2005. Suggestive evidence also indicates that the program may have attenuated the positive effect of birth year productivity shocks on girls’ longer-term height-for-age.

Chronic disease is a kind of health shock that most people cannot avoid, which will increase households' medical expenditure and probably decrease other consumptions. Health insurance is a formal mechanism against health shocks. Theoretically, the integration policy of rural and urban residents medical insurance in China increases coverage level and reimbursement ratio of basic medical insurance, and thus can help smooth consumption better. Our study is aimed to test it empirically. Based on the data of China Household Finance Survey(CHFS) in 2015 and 2017, we use the strategy of difference-in-difference(DID) to investigate whether the fluctuation of household consumption caused by chronic diseases is mitigated by the policy reform. It is found that chronic diseases will cause the dicrease of household food and nonfood consumption and the increase of self-paid medical expenditure. But the integration policy significantly smooths the fluctuation of food consumption and self-paid medical expenditure, and plays no role for nonfood consumption.

We study how investments that require long-term financial commitments are affected by undiversifiable, uninsurable risk in the economic environment in the context of investor preferences characterized by decreasing absolute risk aversion and a desire for consumption smoothing. In our setting, if funds are committed long-term, they become unavailable in the short-term resulting in an increased exposure to shocks before maturity of the investment. Coupled with decreasing absolute risk aversion, this leads to an endogenous discounting of long-term projects. High perceived risk in the economic environment leads to low levels of long-term investment (short-termism). We also explore policy measures that can support long-term investment, in particular, during times of increased uncertainty.

We study the effects of large, temporary income changes on consumption patterns, food insecurity, livelihood coping strategies, child well-being, and health among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that an unconditional cash transfer program (USD 2,100) and a food voucher program (USD 1,620) increase contemporaneous expenditure by 21% and 10%, respectively, with transfers spent on basic needs of rent, food, and energy. Both programs generate immediate, positive effects on child well-being, food security, and livelihood coping strategies. Surprisingly, we find no evidence that any program effects persist even at six months after transfers end. Although cash savings and the stock of durable goods increase while receiving assistance, households liquidate and spend these assets during or soon after the beneficiary period. Effects are similar for new and continuing beneficiaries, suggesting that the length of assistance cycles does not increase consumption smoothing. These findings are consistent with a highly volatile economic environment in which large asset transfers may be unable to yield sustained improvements in well-being.

We quantify the importance of idiosyncratic health risk in a calibrated general equilibrium model of Social Security. We construct an overlapping generations model with rational-expectations households, idiosyncratic labor income and health risk, profit-maximizing firms, incomplete insurance markets, and a government that provides pensions and health insurance. We calibrate this model to the US economy and perform two computational experiments: $\left (i\right)$ cutting Social Security’s payroll tax, and $\left (ii\right)$ modifying Social Security’s benefit-earnings rule. Our findings suggest that health risk amplifies the welfare implications of both experiments: downsizing Social Security always leads to higher overall welfare, but the welfare gain is larger when we account for health risk, and increasing the progressivity of Social Security’s benefit-earnings rule has a larger positive effect on welfare in the presence of health risk. We also find that allowing households additional tools to self-insure against health risk weakens the precautionary motive, so our experiments have similar welfare implications both with and without health risk.

Even amidst strong macroeconomic conditions, families experience high levels of income volatility that have important implications for well-being. Families with limited liquid assets are dramatically less likely to smooth consumption in the face of income fluctuations, and it stands to reason that racial gaps in liquid assets could result in racial differences in consumption smoothing. In this report, the JPMorgan Chase Institute uses administrative banking data to study racial gaps in liquid assets, take-home income, and families’ consumption response to income volatility from the vantage point of a novel de-identified data source: administrative banking data paired with self-reported race information from voter registration files. We find large racial gaps in take-home income and liquid assets which persist across age, income, gender, and geographic segments. Additionally, we find racial differences in consumption smoothing. Compared to White families, Black and Hispanic families exhibit sharper drops in spending after involuntary job loss and larger increases in expenditures after the arrival of the tax refund. However, these racial differences in consumption smoothing are explained by racial gaps in liquid and financial asset buffers. Taken together, our results shed light on the distributional impacts and importance of efforts to reduce financial volatility and increase liquid assets for low-income families and address the structural factors that contribute to racial gaps in income and assets.

This paper examines some issues relating to the establishment of defined contribution pension system. First, it shows that the defined benefit pension system could successfully counteract the financial un-sustainability of the pension system, such as defined contribution pension system. Second, it notes that defined contribution pension system re¬quires the pension amount to be endogenous and, as a consequence, the abandonment of the constitutive aim of the pension system e.g., consumption smoothing. Third, it argues that the extending of the retirement age may counteract the aging of the population and achieve financial sustainability, along with the individual well-being.

Optimal resolution of debt crises requires bailouts to account for borrowers’ time-inconsistency. We show in a dynamic model of strategic default that myopic borrowers undervalue their option to default by a U-shaped error, which causes excessive leverage, imperfect consumption smoothing, underinvestment in normal times, and risk shifting in crisis times. Optimal bailouts either punish or reward myopia through smaller or larger transfers, leading to procrastinated default and protracted crises or the reverse, depending on whether financial transfers exacerbate or alleviate the borrowers’ misperception of default risk. The model shows that borrowers and lenders ultimately self-inflict debt crises through their strategic interaction, myopic distress can be cheaper to resolve than rational distress, and myopia can benefit stakeholders.

Using a unique data set on provincial net factor income flows disaggregated across the three asset classes of debt, equity and FDI reinvested earnings in Korea, we investigated how these asset channels impacted consumption risk sharing during the Global Financial Crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis. Adopting spatial panel methods, this study found that net receipts of debt, equity and FDI retained earnings have all contributed favorably to consumption risk sharing during these crises episodes, with FDI retained earnings robustly positive in its contribution in buffering shocks to consumption. We also found suggestive evidence that net equity receipts rather than net debt receipts contributed more to risk sharing during these episodes. Overall, our results indicate that different asset channels can provide the insurance needed to cushion the economy against adverse shocks.

In this research, the money illusion not only has arisen, but it was checked that a time preference rate is not constant. If it is consumed as the younger age group and a rate of time preference changes with generations, it will be thought that 1-dollar value changes with generations. That is, even if the loss of the same amount produces the younger age group and an old age layer, if it is the younger age group, a loss may also feel the loss by a money illusion small. That is, the time preference rate which affects consumption smoothing also affects a money illusion. The difference for every generation of a time preference rate becomes larger than the influence which only consumption smoothing has on people’s economical action. It has a possibility of bringing a big difference to the economical action for every generation. If the preference of a between at the different time changes with generations, the consumer behaviors at a certain time not only differ for every generation, but it will be thought that the reactions to a loss also differ.

Financial Inclusion - access to financial products by households and firms - is one of the main albeit challenging priorities, both for Advanced Economies (AEs) as well as Emerging Markets (EMs), even more so for the latter. Financial inclusion facilitates consumption smoothing, lowers income inequality, enables risk diversification, and tends to positively affect economic growth. Financial stability is another rising priority among policy makers. This is evident in the re-emergence of macroprudential policies after the global financial crisis, minimizing systemic risk, particularly risks associated with rapid credit growth. However, there are significant policy tradeoffs that could exist between both financial inclusion and financial stability, with mixed evidence on the link between the two objectives. Given the importance of macroprudential policies as a toolbox to achieve financial stability, we examine the impact of macroprudential policies on financial inclusion - a potential cause for financial instability if not carefully implemented. Using panel regressions for 67 countries over the period 2000-2014, our results point to mixed effects of macroprudential policies. The usage (and tightening) of some tools, such as the debt-to-income ratio, appear to reduce financial inclusion whereas others, such as the required reserve ratio (RRR), increase it. Specifically, both institutional quality and financial development appear to increase the effectiveness of macroprudential policies on financial inclusion. Institutional quality helps macroprudential policies boost financial inclusion, with mixed effects as a result of financial development, but the results are more significant when we include either institutional quality or financial development. This leads us to believe that macroprudential policies conditional on better institutional quality and financial development improves financial inclusion. This has important policy implications for financial stability.

This paper offers a comprehensive view of international risk sharing and of related policy issues from the perspective of the European Union. The traditional analyses contemplate three risk-sharing channels: the capital markets channel (through cross border portfolio investments), international transfers and the credit markets channel (via savings). Comparative analyses reveal that, on average, about 80% of the shock remains unsmoothed in Europe while only about 18% of the shock is transmitted to consumers within the US. From aggregated figures, there is space for improving, particularly, the cross-border investments channel in Europe. In this sense, the completion of the Banking and Capital Markets Union are expected to boost risk sharing across European member states. We also review new additional issues usually not contemplated by the traditional literature as depreciation, migration and the role of sovereigns and two new additional channels recently considered in the literature: government consumption and the real exchange rate. Finally, we also examine recent analysis related to the geographic distribution of risk sharing.

We examine an unexplored connection between loss aversion and international consumption smoothing. In the face of expected income declines, loss-averse behaviour implies that any adjustments in consumption are delayed until they are necessary. However, if the expected fall in income materialises, the eventual adjustments in consumption are larger. Therefore, loss aversion could weaken international consumption smoothing. We test this mechanism using measures of economic sentiment. These provide a sense of the expected direction of future income changes. We demonstrate that prevailing confidence and uncertainty, our proxies for economic sentiment, reduce the degree of international consumption smoothing. We provide evidence that this effect arises from loss-averse behaviour, using a test of the asymmetric response of consumption to positive and negative output fluctuations that occur following periods of weak economic sentiment. Our findings have important implications for public institutions and private initiatives that aim to improve cross-country risk sharing.

We examine the household consumption response to fluctuations in income and uncertainty, exploiting a large panel dataset that spans the period of the Great Recession. The results show that after controlling for changes in realized income, both household-specific income uncertainty and local labor market uncertainty depress consumption spending. We also find evidence of heterogeneity in consumption behavior, most notably an inverted U-shape response to income fluctuation and a greater vulnerability to labor market risk by male-only headed households and those with relatively intensive levels of occupation-specific human capital.

Health shocks are common and have serious consequences for the rural poor in developing countries. In this study, we examine the impact of health shocks of household members on the household’s vulnerability to poverty. We also analyze the role of natural resource extraction in dealing with health shocks to smooth household consumption. We use a panel dataset of 550 households in 30 rural villages in Cambodia collected from two survey waves in 2013 and 2014. Our findings reveal that there is a significant association between health shocks and vulnerability to poverty and that the extraction of natural resources is important in consumption smoothing when rural households are faced with health shocks. We suggest that while maintaining natural resource stocks, there is a need to reduce pressures on such resources by developing irrigation systems and non-farm employment sectors.

Financial protection is claimed to be an important objective of health policy. Yet there is a lack of clarity about what it is and no consensus on how to measure it. I address the ambiguity of meaning by considering three questions: Protection of what? Protection against what? Protection with what? The proposed answers lead to the suggestion that financial protection is about shielding nonmedical consumption from the cost of healthcare using formal health insurance and public finances, as well as informal and self insurance mechanisms that do not impair earnings potential. Given this definition, I evaluate four approaches to the measurement of financial protection: a) consumption smoothing over health shocks; b) the risk premium; c) catastrophic healthcare payments; and, d) impoverishing healthcare payments. The first of these does not restrict attention to medical expenses, which limits its relevance to health financing policy. The second rests on assumptions about risk preferences. No measure is entirely satisfactory in its treatment of medical expenses that are financed through informal and self insurance instruments. By ignoring these sources of imperfect insurance, the catastrophic payments measure overstates the impact of out-of-pocket medical expenses on living standards, while the impoverishment measure does not credibly identify poverty caused by them. It is better thought of as a correction to the measurement of poverty.

This paper studies how aggregate economic conditions affect marriage markets in developing countries where marriage is regulated by traditional customary norms. We examine how local economic shocks influence the timing of marriage, and particularly child marriage, in Sub-Saharan Africa and in India, where substantial monetary or in-kind transfers occur with marriage: bride price across Sub-Saharan Africa and dowry in India. In a simple equilibrium model of the marriage market in which parents choose when their children marry, income shocks affect the age of marriage because marriage payments are a source of consumption smoothing, particularly for a woman's family. As predicted by our model, we show that droughts, which reduce annual crop yields by 10 to 15%, have opposite effects on the marriage behavior of a sample of 400,000 women in the two regions: in Sub-Saharan Africa, they increase the annual hazard into child marriage by 3%, while in India droughts reduce such a hazard by 4%. Changes in the age of marriage due to droughts are associated with changes in fertility, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, and with declines in observed marriage payments. Our results indicate that the age of marriage responds to short-term changes in aggregate economic conditions and that traditional norms determine this response. This suggests that, in order to design successful policies to combat child marriage and improve investments in daughters' human capital, it is crucial to understand the economic role of traditional cultural norms.

Using a unique data set with detailed information on Danish households and their mortgages, we show that young and old households are more likely to use IO mortgages compared to middle-aged households. Young households use IO mortgages because they expect higher future income, old households because IO mortgages allow them to circumvent an otherwise binding liquidity constraint. Through different channels, IO mortgages thus facilitate consumption smoothing for young and old households. Our detailed data also allow us to examine how households with IO mortgages differ from households with repayment mortgages in terms of leverage, debt and asset composition, and pension contributions.

Mobile money can potentially contribute to the well-being of people at the bottom of the pyramid by providing them with the necessary platforms to access financial services. The mobile money platforms allow individuals to send, receive or save money in their mobile money wallet, services which they cannot access in the formal banking system. However, there is a shortage of evidence on the impact of these services on issues relating to financial inclusion, such as the ability to smooth consumption on the poor, making it impossible to derive evidence-based policies. Supply-side data is generally limited, as it is impossible to discern crucial estimates, such as age, gender and income, which are crucial to the development of policies. We use an After Access Survey that collects information on access and use of ICTs in seven African countries, in 2017. Our results suggest that mobile money services are more likely to be used by individuals who have no access to bank account. Supporting the notion that these services provide the poor with services that formal banks cannot offer. We find that individuals who live in households that have a relative who migrated to other places in the country are more likely to use mobile money services. Relatively wealthier and the employed individuals are more likely to transfer money to their dependents using mobile money services. At a local level, mobile money can be seen as a tool to drive financial inclusion, but it only allows users to make transactions and does not allow consumers to borrow for consumption smoothing.

We investigate partial insurance and group risk sharing in extended family networks. Our approach is based on decomposing income shocks into group aggregate and idiosyncratic components, allowing us to measure the extent to which each is insured, having accounted for public insurance programs. We apply our framework to extended family networks in the United States by exploiting the unique intergenerational structure of the PSID. We find that over 60% of shocks to household income are potentially insurable within family networks. However, we find little evidence that the extended family provides insurance for such idiosyncratic shocks.

Complete financial markets allow countries to share their consumption risks internationally, thereby creating welfare gains through lower volatility of aggregate consumption. This paper empirically looks at international consumption risk sharing and its determinants in a panel of 120 countries from 1970 to 2014. Contrary to some previous studies, I show that financial liberalization and financial integration has a significantly positive impact on international consumption risk sharing in poorer developing countries, whereas in emerging market countries only capital account openness has an impact. Moreover, there is some evidence that high income inequality or a high share of low income individuals reduces consumption smoothing in less developed countries. Lack of financial reforms, a lower degree of financial integration and higher inequality can thus partly explain why the degree of risk sharing is lower in developing countries than in advanced economies.

This paper provides an in-depth investigation of Epstein-Zin preferences under an uncertain lifetime. These models have been gaining popularity as normative preference models in life-cycle applications. Though extensively used, it is unclear if the preference models are well-understood by the users. To this end, this paper studies the decision-making under Epstein-Zin preferences. Specifically, analytical solutions for a simple consumption and savings problem are derived, isolating the impact of relative risk aversion (RRA), elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS), time discounting, and risks stemming from mortality, investment, and inflation. We investigate three Epstein-Zin preference models that differ in their treatment of mortality risk, and find that some lead to normatively implausible solutions. Importantly, we find that the EIS is not always monotone in its effect on consumption volatility over time, meaning that its interpretation can be ambiguous when considering an uncertain future lifetime. This has been misinterpreted in the literature to date. We also show that one particular Epstein-Zin specification is not necessarily a generalization of expected discounted utility maximization in the case of constant relative risk aversion, as many works wrongly claim.

We show there is a much stronger negative dynamic relation between changes in economic uncertainty and Treasury yields over weaker-economic times since at least 1990. We document this economic-state variation in uncertainty-yield dynamics for weekly and monthly change horizons, for nominal yields and real-yield proxies, for multiple economic-state identification methods, and for different economic-uncertainty metrics. We provide additional evidence to probe interpretation, especially relying on survey-based expected economic growth and inflation. Our collective evidence suggests that short-term fluctuations in precautionary-savings and consumption-smoothing forces are particularly influential on interest rate dynamics during weaker-economic times.

We estimate the effect of mobile money adoption on consumption smoothing, poverty and human capital investments in Tanzania. We exploit the rapid expansion of the mobile money agent network between 2010 and 2012 and combine this with idiosyncratic shocks from variation in rainfall over time and across space in an instrumented DiD methodology. We find that adopter households are able to smooth consumption during periods of shocks and maintain their investments in human capital. Results on time use of children and labor force participation complement the findings on the important role of mobile money for the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on its effects on market outcomes and welfare. Conceptually, the effects of interest rate caps are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer protection from banks’ market power and reductions in credit access. We exploit a policy in Chile that lowered interest rate caps by 20 percentage points to understand its impacts. Using comprehensive individual-level administrative data, we document that the policy decreased transacted interest rates by 9%, but also reduced the number of loans by 19%. To estimate the welfare effects of this policy, we develop and estimate a model of loan applications, pricing, and repayment of loans. Consumer surplus decreases by an equivalent of 3.5% of average income, with larger losses for risky borrowers. Survey evidence suggests these welfare effects may be driven by decreased consumption smoothing and increased financial distress. Interest rate caps provide greater consumer protection in more concentrated markets, but welfare effects are negative even under a monopoly. Risk-based regulation reduces the adverse effects of interest rate caps, but does not eliminate them.

We investigate the importance of rational and psychological motives for choosing a saving and consumption trajectory after retirement. Using an online experimental survey, we elicit the impact on saving motives of alternative retirement drawdown design, comprising different combinations of annuity income and wealth, and major life events such as becoming frail or losing a spouse. We find that individuals' saving motives are revised where they expect major life events such as a health shock or losing a spouse but are less responsive to variation in 'experimental' retirement drawdown arrangements, where they remain aligned to prevailing institutional arrangements.

This paper studies banks' liquidity provision in the Lagos and Wright model of monetary exchanges. With aggregate uncertainty we show that banks sometimes exhaust their cash reserves and fail to satisfy their depositors' need of consumption smoothing. The banking panics can be eliminated by the zero-interest policy for the perfect risk sharing, but the first best can be achieved only at the Friedman rule. In our monetary equilibrium, the probability of banking panics is endogenous and increases with inflation, as is consistent with empirical evidence. The model derives a rich array of non-trivial effects of inflation on the equilibrium deposit and the bank's portfolio.

In this paper I generalize the following rule of Ramsey (1928) on the discount rate with regime switching: the discount rate is the sum of the rate of pure time preference and the product of the consumption elasticity of marginal utility and the consumption growth rate. The Ramsey rule can be extended to regime-dependent interest-rate formulas for discounting future regime changes. Notwithstanding debate about empirically plausible values of the rate of pure time preference, I theoretically show that the effect of pure time preference is overwhelmingly dominated by the effect of the regime switching parameter. This is closely associated with the consumption smoothing consequences across regimes.

This paper uses a unique data set on 143,000 poor households from Northern Bangladesh to analyze the effects of microfinance membership on a household’s ability to cope with seasonal famine known as Monga. We develop an identification and estimation strategy that exploits a jump and a kink at the 10-decimal land ownership-threshold driven by the Microfinance Institution screening process to ensure repayment by excluding the ultra-poor. Evidence shows that microfinance membership improves food security during Monga, especially for the poorest households who survive at the margin of one and two meals a day. The positive effects on food security are, however, not driven by higher income, as microcredit does not improve the ability to migrate for work, nor does it reduce dependence on distress sale of labor. The evidence is consistent with consumption smoothing being the primary mechanism behind the gains in food security of MFI households during the season of starvation.

According to economic theory, consumers should boost present consumption when anticipating an income increase and reduce consumption when anticipating a decrease. Yet, many studies have observed a lack of such consumption smoothing. We investigate a psychological factor that can predict when consumers will adjust their current consumption to future income changes: self-continuity, or a sense of identification with and connection to the circumstances of the future self. We propose that consumers tend to perceive lower self-continuity when anticipating an income increase compared to a decrease. Consistent with this notion, we show that consumers are less likely to adjust present discretionary spending upward when anticipating an income increase than to adjust spending downward when anticipating an income decrease. Further, manipulations of self-continuity mitigate the asymmetry: when we induced high self-continuity, consumers adjusted spending to both future income increases and decreases, and when we induced low self-continuity, consumers adjusted present spending neither to future income increases nor to decreases. This demonstrates the role of self-continuity above and beyond other factors potentially contributing to the asymmetry, such as loss aversion and diminishing marginal utility. Six studies involving scenarios as well as real income expectations and behavior support the notion that consumers are more likely to smooth consumption when they perceive a higher sense of self-continuity.

This paper investigates the contribution of private and public channels for consumption risk sharing in the EMU over the period 1999-2015. In particular, we explore the role of financial integration versus international financial assistance for private consumption smoothing in this set of countries. In addition, we present a time-varying test which allows estimating how risk sharing has evolved since the start of the EMU, and in particular during the recent crisis. Our results suggest that, whereas in the early years of the EMU only about 40% of country-specific output shocks were smoothed, in the aftermath of the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis about 65% of these shocks were absorbed, therefore reducing consumption growth differentials across countries. This progressive improvement of the shock-absorption capacity is due to a higher financial integration, but also to the activation of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) channelling official loans to distressed euro zone economies. We also show that cross-border holdings of equities and debt seem to be more effective than cross-border bank loans in isolating households from country-specific shocks, therefore contributing to consumption smoothing.

Using novel microdata, we explore lifecycle consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that households' ability to smooth consumption over the lifecycle is large, particularly, in rural areas. Consumption in old age is sustained by shifting to self-farmed staple food, as opposed to traditional savings mechanisms or food gifts. This smoothing strategy indicates two important costs. The first cost is a loss of human capital as children seem to be diverted away from school and into producing self-farmed food. Second, a diet largely concentrated in staple food (e.g., maize in Malawi) in old age results in a loss of nutritional quality for households headed by the elderly.

We consider a repeated principal-agent model, where a single agent exhibits problems of self control modelled using Gul and Pesendorfer (2001) type temptation preferences. In such a setting, for a parameterized strength of self-control, we solve for the optimal multi-period contract. Our analysis identifies a new channel of principal and agent interactions, that can be used to provide incentives, this being the reduction of agent's self control costs. In fact, the principal computes (and uses) agent's most tempting item but never finds it optimal to reduce the agent's self-control cost to zero. Presence of this new channel challenges typical results obtained in models with no-temptation on the agent's side. For example, the intrinsic motivation (resulting from costly self-control) can substitute for standard (external) incentives, and hence the moral hazard problem can be mitigated (for suficiently high temptation parameter). Moreover, the optimal contract calls for a lower deferred part of the bonus (or consumption smoothing) than in the model with no temptations. Under limited commitment, presence of self-control also reduces agent's willingness to break or renegotiate the contract after output realization within some period, and make the optimal contract spot implementable (again for suficiently high temptation). Impact of self-control on the cost of implementation as well as willingness to safe/borrow is ambiguous, however.

This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household's preference for sons coincides with adverse agricultural productivity shocks, previous research has shown households tend to disproportionately reduce investments (prenatal and postnatal) in their female children. This behavior leads to a relatively more balanced sex ratio in good rainfall years and a more skewed sex ratio (in favor of boys) in bad rainfall years. We find evidence of both prenatal and postnatal channels in India and show that a workfare program, which decouples both wages and consumption from rainfall, attenuates the relationship between rainfall and the infant sex ratio. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation and the assumption that females should never significantly outnumber males, the program could have saved around 550 girls per district per year -- relative to boys -- if the government had implemented it in the years 2001 to 2005. Additional results on postnatal channels show substantial impacts on long-run health outcomes of surviving girls, as rainfall no longer differentially affects girls' height-for-age, relative to boys', following the implementation of the program. In an important deviation from previous research, the entirety of the relationship between the sex ratio and rainfall is apparently driven by sex-selective abortions, not infant mortality.

Official income inequality statistics indicate a sharp rise in inequality over the past five decades. These statistics do not accurately reflect inequality because income is poorly measured, particularly in the tails of the distribution, and current income differs from permanent income, failing to capture the consumption paid for through borrowing and dissaving and the consumption of durables such as houses and cars. We examine income inequality between 1963 and 2014 using the Current Population Survey and consumption inequality between 1960 and 2014 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We construct improved measures of consumption, focusing on its well-measured components that are reported at a high and stable rate relative to national accounts. While overall income inequality (as measured by the 90/10 ratio) rose over the past five decades, the rise in overall consumption inequality was small. The patterns for the two measures differ by decade, and they moved in opposite directions after 2006. Income inequality rose in both the top and bottom halves of the distribution, but increases in consumption inequality are only evident in the top half. The differences are also concentrated in single parent families and single individuals. Although changing demographics can account for some of the changes in consumption inequality, they account for little of the changes in income inequality. Consumption smoothing cannot explain the differences between income and consumption at the very bottom, but the declining quality of income data can. Asset price changes likely account for some of the differences between the measures in recent years for the top half of the distribution.

In this paper, we investigate the link between intra-household resource allocation and familial ties between household members. We show that, within the same geographic, economic and social environments, households where members have 'stronger' familial ties (nuclear family households) achieve near Pareto efficient allocation of productive resources and Pareto efficient allocation of consumption while households with 'weaker' familial ties (extended family households) do not. We propose a theoretical model of the household based on the idea that altruism between household members vary with familial ties which generates predictions consistent with the observed empirical patterns.

We report the results of an experiment designed to study the determinants of asset price movement and consumption smoothing behavior across asset markets populated with varying proportion of traders with and without having induced motive to smooth consumption. Although the asset is over-priced compared to the risk-neutral fundamental value in all sessions, the extent of over-pricing and magnitude of price movement is significantly higher when traders with no induced motive to trade are present. We also find that the price of the asset co-moves with the dividend state, with price predictability being higher in the presence of traders with induced motive to smooth consumption. Participants motivated to minimize consumption fluctuations are able to do so with the inclination being more for those having lower initial endowment. With fixed prices, traders are able to smooth consumption not only over periods but also over the dividend states.