Grant, Charles; (2001) Using differences across US states to think about consumption. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text out.pdf Download (3MB)

Abstract

This thesis investigates some contemporary issues in consumption using household data. It exploits state of residence information available over several years using the Consumer Expenditure Survey: a US survey of spending, and a variety of other household characteristics. The thesis contains three distinct studies. The first looks at how consumer bankruptcy rules affects the debt holdings, and consumption behaviour of US households. Harsher punishment results in more debt but less smoothing. The second study looks at how differences in state taxes translates into differences in the ability of agents to share the idiosyncratic component of their income shocks, finding that making taxes more re-distributive reduces agents ability to insure risks. The last study accepts that some agents are credit-constrained, and recovers estimates of the supply of, and the demand for, credit. This leads to estimates of the proportion of agents credit constrained, 28%, of how agents differ, and of how much more agents constrained agents wish to borrow.

Download activity - last month

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as CSVJSONXML

Archive Staff Only

View Item