Search Results
Journal Article
Tax reform and investment: how big an impact?
Working Paper
Sustainable Consumption and the Comprehensive Economic Well-Being of American Households
This paper develops a comprehensive measure of household economic well-being. The “sustainable consumption” concept accounts for income, assets, debt, transfer payments, and asset returns to estimate a consumption path that balances resources with expenditure over a household’s lifetime. Calculating sustainable consumption using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data demonstrates that it acts as an anchor for actual household spending. Results show that following a period of rapid growth from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, sustainable consumption stagnated on average. In the aftermath ...
Journal Article
Tax reform and investment: blessing or curse?
Report
The Sustainability of U.S. Household Finances
The financial sustainability of U.S. households is usually proxied by intuitive measures, like the debt-income ratio, that are only loosely linked with a more rigorous definition of sustainability. We employ balance sheet and income date from the PSID to project lifetime resources and compare these resources with household consumption to assess household financial sustainability. Preliminary results show that while the vast majority of American households were sustainable in the mid 1980s, sustainability declined sharply through the early 2000s and remained low until the eve of the Great ...