Sooner or later? The impact of child education on household consumption

We study the impact of one more year of child’s education on household (non-durable) consumption. We exploit an exogenous shock generated by a university reform in Italy in the early 2000s. We find that families responded in a way that is consistent with education as a production good. The higher child’s education produced household positive, permanent income innovations. Hence, family non-durable consumption increased. Our findings suggest that education can be an insurance device against adverse permanent income shocks. The 2001 reform not only positively affected offspring’s years of schooling, but it also had a positive effect to boost household consumption.

Lumpy Durable Consumption Demand and the Limited Ammunition of Monetary Policy

The prevailing neo‐Wicksellian view holds that the central bank's objective is to track the natural rate of interest ( r *), which itself is largely exogenous to monetary policy. We challenge this view using a fixed‐cost model of durable consumption demand, in which expansionary monetary policy prompts households to accelerate purchases of durable goods. This yields an intertemporal trade‐off in aggregate demand as encouraging households to increase durable holdings today leaves fewer households acquiring durables going forward. Interest rates must be kept low to support demand going forward, so accommodative monetary policy today reduces r * in the future. We show that this mechanism is quantitatively important in explaining the persistently low level of real interest rates and r * after the Great Recession.

Sectoral Analyses

This wide-ranging chapter reviews a number of models that underpin aggregate analyses (‘sectoral’ models). It begins with the profusion of work on consumption (Permanent Income Hypothesis, the Life-Cycle Model, and the modern analyses that sprang from the ‘random walk’ model). Saving, durable consumption, demographics, and behavioural elements are among the many topics reviewed. The chapter continues with investment, including issues such as: the accelerator, neoclassical model, user cost of capital, Tobin’s q, effects of financial imperfections, uncertainty, state-contingent (‘S-s’) models, vintages, technical progress, and inventories. Housing is reviewed next, another innovation of the book. Finally, the models of consumption are a stepping-stone towards the macroeconomics of finance. The topics reviewed here include the CCAPM and CAPM models, the equity premium puzzle, and the term structure of interest rates, as well as developments in stock markets and the growth of finance (‘financialization’).

Dynamic effects of consumption tax reforms with durable consumption

This paper introduces durables into a dynamic general equilibrium overlapping generation model with idiosyncratic income shocks and endogenous borrowing constraints, which depend on durables. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the welfare effects of consumption tax reforms in a richer model that captures the difference between nondurable and durable consumption. When durables are considered, the standard results that a shift to consumption taxes is welfare improving are overturned. The mechanism of this opposing result is that consumption tax makes durable consumption more expensive without relaxing the borrowing constraint. The inability of borrowing to insure against income risk deviates the economy further away from market completeness and particularly hurts young and poor households. As a result, welfare decreases, coupled with negative redistribution.