The pass-through of uncertainty shocks to households

How Do Households Respond to Uncertainty Shocks?

Economic disruptions generally coincide with heightened uncertainty. In the United States, uncertainty increased sharply with the recent housing market crash, financial crisis, deep recession, and uneven recovery. In July 2010 congressional testimony, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke described conditions as “unusually uncertain.” The uncertain landscape was also cited as a factor in the slow r...

How Do Households Respond to Income Shocks

How do households respond to income shocks?∗

Commonly used consumption/saving models have radically different implications for households response to income shocks, ranging from the hands-to-mouth model, where consumption bears all the adjustment, to the complete markets model, where wealth bears all the adjustment. In this paper we use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which is the only available micro dataset that conta...

LeChatelier-Samuelson principle in games and pass-through of shocks

The LeChatelier-Samuelson principle (“the principle”) states that as a reaction to a shock, an agent’s short-run adjustment of an action is smaller than the long-run adjustment of that action when the other related actions can also be adjusted. We extend the principle to strategic environments and to shocks that affect more than one action directly. We define long run as an adjustment that also...

The Response of Consumption in Russian Households to Economic Shocks

This paper examines the extent to which consumption in Russian households responds to exogenous income shocks. During the time period studied in this paper (1994 – 1998), Russia experienced two major economic crises. Both featured extreme movements in the real ruble-dollar exchange rate. The price of oil, which is typically thought to have a strong effect on the Russian economy, was also quite ...