Global food aid is considered a critical consumption smoothing mechanism in many countries. However, its record of stabilizing consumption has been mixed. This paper examines the cyclical properties ...

We study the consumption response to typical labor income shocks and investigate how these vary by wealth and race. First, we estimate the elasticity of consumption with respect to income using an ...

When agents are unable to smooth consumption and have distorted beliefs about the likelihood of future income realisations, uncertainty about future states of the world has a direct effect on ...

With 250 million migrants globally, remittances are one of the major sources of income in many developing countries. While there is abundant evidence that remittances facilitate consumption smoothing ...

The ability to smooth consumption is critical for the poor even from a survival point of view. Mainstream economics research has shown that a significant part of the hardships faced by the poor can be ...

I have a big problem with conventional personal financial planning. Unfortunately, it has little connection to what basic economics and, indeed, common sense recommends. As a consequence, it produces ...

This paper presents a model where income distribution and redistributive fiscal policy interact to affect the budget deficit and the pattern of net borrowing of a country. According to the standard ...

Editor's note: Financial Planning 1.0 is what most of us encounter through advisers or on the Internet. Meet version 2.0. This is the first in an eight-part series, written by Laurence Kotlikoff and ...

Citations: Ponticelli, Jacopo, Amir Sufi, Atif Mian, Gabriel Garber. 2024. Consumption Smoothing or Consumption Binging? The effects of government-led consumer credit expansion in Brazil. Journal of ...

This paper examines the incidence of consumption smoothing or risk sharing among the above and below poverty households in India. The results suggest partial risk sharing activities between households ...