Analysts forecasting the course of the U.S. economy pay close attention to consumer spending. Because personal consumption expenditures make up about twothirds of the country’s gross domestic product, factors that could influence consumer spending can have significant effects on the economy’s health. Among these factors, the sharp increase of household indebtedness and the rising share of incom...

The focus of this study is on the impact of World Bank structural adjustment operations on health expenditures and outcomes. We compare trends and levels of real per capita public spending on health, private consumption (which is the resource base for private health expenditures), and groupings child mortality indicators in four groups of countries. These are: (i) countries that started to borr...

This paper studies a two-sector New Keynesian model that captures the hump-shaped response of non-durable and durable spending to a monetary shock when non-durable prices are sticky and durable goods are flexibly priced. Based on the estimated parameters, we show that habit formation and investment adjustment costs are not sufficient to generate the gradual response of non-durable and durable s...

This article examines the influence of income distribution in the determination of effective demand in the US. A simple model is developed to simulate the effects of changing income inequality on the aggregate propensity to consume. The simulation results illustrate that income inequality has a substantial negative impact on consumption when household spending is assumed to be income-constraine...

This paper employs a cointegrated vector autoregressive model to assess the growth effect of aid in Uganda over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid in Uganda has had both direct and indirect beneficial association with growth; that it is the productivity and not the stead state level of investment that contributes to achieving target growth rates; and that consumption spending is more b...

Accurate prediction of user attributes from social media is valuable for both social science analysis and consumer targeting. In this paper, we propose a systematic method to leverage user online social media content for predicting offline restaurant consumption level. We utilize the social login as a bridge and construct a dataset of 8,844 users who have been linked across Dianping (similar to...

Ongoing Congressional deliberations about reforming Social Security and Medicare require accurate assessments of the economic status of the retiring population. The most direct indicator of economic well-being is consumption. Yet our understanding of how consumption evolves with age is limited. The primary data source in the United States for understanding spending patterns over the life cycle ...

This paper explores the relationship between product innovation and consumption inequality. We employ a modified version of the agent-based macroeconomic model in Georges (2011, 2015). A rise in rents accruing to salaried workers can shift both production and R&D spending toward products consumed by that class of worker. The increase in income inequality will then have a magnified impact on con...