Household Services Expenditures: An Update
This post updates and extends my July 2011 blog piece on household discretionary services expenditures.
Nudging Inflation Expectations: An Experiment
Managing consumers’ inflation expectations is of critical importance to central banks in the conduct of monetary policy.
Just Released: Has Household Deleveraging Continued?
Today’s release of the 2012Q2 Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit indicates a continuation of the downward trend in household debt, which followed a long period of substantial increases.
The Untold Story of Municipal Bond Defaults
In our recent post on the state and local sector, we argued that structural problems in state and local budgets were exacerbated by the recession and would likely restrain the sector’s growth for years to come.
Is the 2005 Bankruptcy Reform Working?
While the name of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act suggests two goals, BAPCPA seemed to be more about abuse prevention than consumer protection.
A Boost in Your Paycheck: How Are U.S. Workers Using the Payroll Tax Cut?
Over the past several months, there was a flurry of debate in Washington over the extension of the payroll tax cut.
The Changing Face of Foreclosures
The foreclosure crisis in America continues to grow, with more than 3 million homes foreclosed since 2008 and another 2 million in the process of foreclosure.
Grading Student Loans
Student loans support the education of millions of students nationwide, yet much is unknown about the student loan market.
“Flip This House”: Investor Speculation and the Housing Bubble
The recent financial crisis—the worst in eighty years—had its origins in the enormous increase and subsequent collapse in housing prices during the 2000s.
Inflation Expectations and Behavior: Do Survey Respondents Act on Their Beliefs?
Surveys of consumers’ inflation expectations are now a key component of monetary policy. To date, however, little work has been done on 1) whether individual consumers act on their beliefs about future inflation, and 2) whether the inflation expectations elicited by these surveys are actually informative about the respondents’ beliefs. In this post, we report on a new study by Armantier, Bruine de Bruin, Topa, van der Klaauw, and Zafar (2010) that investigates these two issues by comparing consumers’ survey-based inflation expectations with their behavior in a financially incentivized experiment. We find that the decisions of survey respondents are generally consistent with their stated inflation beliefs.
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