'Less Is More': Consumer Spending and the Size of Economic Stimulus Payments

By Michelle Andreolli and Paolo Surico

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

We study how consumption responds to unexpected, transitory income gains of different sizes using hypothetical questions from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth. Affluent households exhibit higher marginal propensities to consume (MPCs) out...

Energy, the Stock Market, and the Putty-Clay Investment Model

By Chao Wei

American Economic Review, March 2003

Financial Frictions: Micro versus Macro Volatility

By Renato Faccini, Seungcheol Lee, Ralph Luetticke, Morten O. Ravn, and Tobias Renkin

American Economic Review, February 2026

We argue that consumer credit spreads matter for household choices and that time-varying spreads have important distributional consequences. Studying Danish household data, we show that consumer credit spreads have heterogeneous impact on asset dynamics a...

Do Consumers React to Anticipated Income Changes? Evidence from the Alaska Permanent Fund

By Chang-Tai Hsieh

American Economic Review, March 2003

"3rd of tha Month": Do Social Security Recipients Smooth Consumption Between Checks?

By Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Review, March 2003

Breadwinner's Burden: The Effect of Financial Concerns on Sleeplessness

By Claire Duquennois and Maulik Jagnani

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2026

Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that eligible household heads surveyed just after an unconditional cash transfer in Indonesia report a 0.4 standard deviation improvement in sleep quality compared to those surveyed just before, and they pe...

The Long-Term Impacts of Mixing the Rich and Poor: Evidence from Conscript Dorms

By Elias Einiö

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2026

To what extent is economic success determined by with whom individuals interact socially? We tackle this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment in the Finnish conscription. Our research design is based on the alphabetization of dorms, whi...

Large Firms, Consumer Heterogeneity, and the Profit Share

By Robert C. Feenstra, Luca Macedoni, and Mingzhi (Jimmy) Xu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2026

We examine the relationship between large firms and the rising profit share in a model that features oligopolistic competition and consumer heterogeneity. Conditional on the sales distribution, consumer heterogeneity increases firm-level markups and the p...

Adjustable Product Attributes, Indirect Network Effects, and Subsidy Design: The Case of Electric Vehicles

By Kevin Remmy

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2026

This paper develops a structural model of endogenous product attribute choice in the presence of indirect network effects to study electric vehicle (EV) subsidies. Using data on the German EV market, I find that a support scheme almost doubled EV sales bu...

Weak Instruments: Diagnosis and Cures in Empirical Econometrics

By Jinyong Hahn and Jerry Hausman

American Economic Review, May 2003

Refining the Definition of the Unbanked

By Elena Falcettoni and Vegard M. Nygaard

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

We propose a new way to classify individuals without a bank account, accounting for their actual interest in being banked. Analogous to how unemployment statistics are defined, we differentiate individuals that do not have a bank account and would like to...

Who Remains Unbanked in the United States and Why?

By Paul Calem, Christopher Henderson, and Jenna Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

This paper examines factors associated with unbanked status among US households from 2015 to 2019 using FDIC survey data with fixed effects and multilevel modeling. With rising incomes reducing unbanked percentages overall, unbanked status became more con...

Beyond Banks: Trust among the Financially Underserved

By Paola Boel, Daniela Puzzello, and Peter Zimmerman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

In 2023, over 18 percent of US households were financially underserved. Prior work identifies mistrust in banks as an important factor, but it is unclear whether this mistrust is unique to banks. To address this, we surveyed underserved individuals in the...

Defining Households That Are Underserved in Digital Payment Services

By Claire Greene, Fumiko Hayashi, Alicia Lloro, Oz Shy, Joanna Stavins, and Ying Lei Toh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

US households that lack digital means of making and receiving payments cannot participate fully in an increasingly digitized economy. Assessing the scope of this problem and addressing it requires a definition of households that are underserved in digital...

Natural Disaster Expectations and Household Adaptation

By Shifrah Aron-Dine

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

How do households form expectations about the risk of future natural disasters, and how do these expectations translate into household adaptation choices? A stylized model of natural disasters yields predictions that higher perceived risk should increase ...

Quasilinearity and Its Discontents: Public-Good Regulation with Consumer Risk Aversion and Income Effects

By Edward E. Schlee

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

In the partial-equilibrium literature on regulation, the usual measure of social welfare is a weighted average of expected profit and expected consumers' surplus. It is justified if two strong quasilinearity assumptions hold on each consumer's von Neumann...

Look Within: Demographic Grouping Masks Inflation Inequality

By Kelsey O’Flaherty

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2026

The recent inflation surge prompted renewed assessments of inflation inequality. Examinations of inflation by income or other demographic groups point to a shrinking or stable inflation gap between high- and low-income households in 2022. At the same time...

Survivors' Mental Health and the Protective Role of Income Stability

By Itzik Fadlon, Astrid Sophie Fugleholm, and Torben Heien Nielsen

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2026

We use administrative records on the universe of Danish households to characterize survivors' mental health following their spouse's death. We provide visually clear evidence for the immediate, large, and lingering adverse impacts and focus on studying th...

The Gender Gap in Wages, circa 2000

By June O'Neill

American Economic Review, May 2003

Stock-Market Participation, Intertemporal Substitution, and Risk-Aversion

By Annette Vissing-Jørgensen and Orazio P. Attanasio

American Economic Review, May 2003