This book provides an overview of recent research on saving and consumption, a field in
which substantial progress has been made over the last decade. Economists attempting to …

Consumer expenditure accounts for between 50% and 70% of spending in most economies.
Not surprisingly, the consumption function has been the most studied of the aggregate …

The behavior of personal saving in the US economy has long held a fascination for
economists. The earliest consumption functions, based on cross-sectional data from …

Macroeconomic research on consumption has been influenced profoundly by rational
expectations. First, rational expectations together with the hypothesis of constant expected …

This paper provides a simple technique for assigning a measure of total consumption to
households in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Using regressions from the …

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 …

THE theory of the consumption function proposed in this book evolved over a number of
years. During most of this period, I was not engaged in empirical work on consumption …

The idea that consumers allocate their consumption over time so as to maximize a stable
individualistic utility function provides the basis for almost all modem work on the …

This paper proposes that the time-series data on consumption, income, and interest rates
are best viewed as generated not by a single representative consumer but by two groups of …

We document some key facts about aggregate consumption and its subcomponents over
time. We then document the behavior of some important determinants of consumption, such …