Author: Thomas Wilson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description

Author: Calogero Brancatelli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 35

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Book Description
This paper revisits the effects of income changes on consumption of private households by focusing on a commonly disregarded and yet sizeable component of household expenditures: consumption of food and non-food consumer packaged goods. We exploit a new data source from the Netherlands that combines on the level of individual households administrative data from tax records with household scanner data, thus minimizing measurement error for both expenditures and the key explanatory variable, household disposable income. Even after controlling for differences in needs and for consumption volume, we document significant variation in expenditures and thereby reveal substantial scope for potential savings. Still, even though the Netherlands experienced a recession and a subsequent recovery in the analysed period from 2011 to 2018, we find only an economically small relationship with income, which is also not higher for households with low income or low liquidity. Despite remaining small in magnitude, we document inter alia a much higher coefficient for single households. We can exclude various potentially confounding effects as we show that retailers practice national pricing and as we control for sample composition and potential substitution between in-house and out-of-house consumption.

Author: Howard J. Sherman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400862043
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Are the recurring recessions of the capitalist world merely short-term adjustments to changing economic circumstances in a system that tends, in general, toward equilibrium? In this accessible study of the business cycle, Howard Sherman makes a powerful case that recessions and painful involuntary unemployment are endogenous to capitalism. Drawing especially on the work of Wesley Clair Mitchell, Karl Marx, and John M. Keynes, Sherman explains why the nature of the business cycle produces serious economic loss and misery during its contraction phase, just as it produces growth in its expansion phase. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Richard Vernon Clemence
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 616

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Book Description

Author: Atif Mian
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627750X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
“A concise and powerful account of how the great recession happened and what should be done to avoid another one . . . well-argued and consistently informative.” —Wall Street Journal The Great American Recession of 2007-2009 resulted in the loss of eight million jobs and the loss of four million homes to foreclosures. Is it a coincidence that the United States witnessed a dramatic rise in household debt in the years before the recession—that the total amount of debt for American households doubled between 2000 and 2007 to $14 trillion? Definitely not. Armed with clear and powerful evidence, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi reveal in House of Debt how the Great Recession and Great Depression, as well as less dramatic periods of economic malaise, were caused by a large run-up in household debt followed by a significantly large drop in household spending. Though the banking crisis captured the public’s attention, Mian and Sufi argue strongly with actual data that current policy is too heavily biased toward protecting banks and creditors. Increasing the flow of credit, they show, is disastrously counterproductive when the fundamental problem is too much debt. As their research shows, excessive household debt leads to foreclosures, causing individuals to spend less and save more. Less spending means less demand for goods, followed by declines in production and huge job losses. How do we end such a cycle? With a direct attack on debt, say Mian and Sufi. We can be rid of painful bubble-and-bust episodes only if the financial system moves away from its reliance on inflexible debt contracts. As an example, they propose new mortgage contracts that are built on the principle of risk-sharing, a concept that would have prevented the housing bubble from emerging in the first place. Thoroughly grounded in compelling economic evidence, House of Debt offers convincing answers to some of the most important questions facing today’s economy: Why do severe recessions happen? Could we have prevented the Great Recession and its consequences? And what actions are needed to prevent such crises going forward?

Author: Robert J. Gordon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226304590
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 882

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Book Description
In recent decades the American economy has experienced the worst peace-time inflation in its history and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. These circumstances have prompted renewed interest in the concept of business cycles, which Joseph Schumpeter suggested are "like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them." In The American Business Cycle, some of the most prominent macroeconomics in the United States focuses on the questions, To what extent are business cycles propelled by external shocks? How have post-1946 cycles differed from earlier cycles? And, what are the major factors that contribute to business cycles? They extend their investigation in some areas as far back as 1875 to afford a deeper understanding of both economic history and the most recent economic fluctuations. Seven papers address specific aspects of economic activity: consumption, investment, inventory change, fiscal policy, monetary behavior, open economy, and the labor market. Five papers focus on aggregate economic activity. In a number of cases, the papers present findings that challenge widely accepted models and assumptions. In addition to its substantive findings, The American Business Cycle includes an appendix containing both the first published history of the NBER business-cycle dating chronology and many previously unpublished historical data series.

Author: George Hildebrand
Publisher: Irwin Professional Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Author: Orazio P. Attanasio
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Consumption (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
The main aim of this paper is to assess the validity of the life cycle model of consumption. In particular, we address an issue that has recently received much attention, especially in the macroeconomic literature: that of "excess sensitivity" of consumption growth to income growth. We do this using a time series of cross sections and a novel and flexible parameterization of preferences. The former allows us to' address aggregation issues directly, while with the latter we can allow both the discount factor and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution eis to be affected by various observable variables and lifetime wealth. The main findings can be summarized as follows: (i) the excess sensitivity of consumption growth to labor income disappears when we control for demographic variables. This is true both at life cycle and business cycle frequencies. (ii) estimation of a flexible specification of preferences indicates that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is a function of several variables, including the level of consumption. The eis increases with the level of consumption, as expected. (iii) the variables that change the eis are also important in explaining why we observe excess sensitivity over the business cycle. (iv) we are able to reconcile our results with those reported both in the macro and micro literature. (v) in our specification the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is not very well determined. This result, however, should be taken with care, as we have not made an effort to construct a 'preferred' specification, which would probably include additional controls for labor supply behavior. The evidence presented shows that the life cycle model cannot be easily dismissed. Indeed, we believe that the model does a good job at representing consumption behavior both over the life cycle and over the business cycle.

Author: James Stemble Duesenberry
Publisher: New York : McGraw-Hill
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description

Author: Bruce D. Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
Abstract: We examine the relationship between the business cycle and poverty for the period from 1960 to 2008 using income data from the Current Population Survey and consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This new evidence on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and poverty is of particular interest given recent changes in anti-poverty policies that have placed greater emphasis on participation in the labor market and in-kind transfers. We look beyond official poverty, examining alternative income poverty and consumption poverty, which have conceptual and empirical advantages as measures of the well-being of the poor. We find that both income and consumption poverty are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions. A one percentage point increase in unemployment is associated with an increase in the after-tax income poverty rate of 0.9 to 1.1 percentage points in the long-run, and an increase in the consumption poverty rate of 0.3 to 1.2 percentage points in the long-run. The evidence on whether income is more responsive to the business cycle than consumption is mixed. Income poverty does appear to be more responsive using national level variation, but consumption poverty is often more responsive to unemployment when using regional variation. Low percentiles of both income and consumption are sensitive to macroeconomic conditions, and in most cases low percentiles of income appear to be more responsive than low percentiles of consumption