Search Results

(refine search)

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT

All:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:
Keywords:

+ Add Search Parameter

Journal Article
K-shaped Economy or Not? Evidence from a Payments Survey
Routh, Aditi; Shy, Oz (2026-05-18)
Using transaction data from a payments survey in the United States, we analyze how consumers across income groups changed their spending between 2021 and 2025. We find that spending by consumers with high household income (fourth and fifth quintiles) grew substantially faster than spending by consumers with low household income (first to third quintiles), a pattern that holds across total spending, grocery spending, and spending on necessities. Both groups saw spending increases, but the gap in growth rates points to a widening of consumption inequality across the income distribution. Rather ...
Policy Hub , Volume 2026 , Issue 3 , Pages 12

Report
Do Consumers Rely More Heavily on Credit Cards While Unemployed?
Cole, Allison (2016-12-20)
Leading up to the Great Recession, households increased their credit card debt by over 16 percent ($121 billion) during the five-year period from 2004 to 2009. The unemployment rate simultaneously began to rise in 2008, increasing from 5.0 percent in January 2008 to a high of 10.0 percent in October of 2009. During the recovery, from 2009 to 2014, credit card debt fell by more than 25 percent, as the unemployment rate returned to near prerecession levels. These coincident developments have led to speculation that consumers facing unemployment or job uncertainty may have increased their ...
Consumer Payments Research Data Reports , Paper 2016-06

Working Paper
Old, Frail, and Uninsured: Accounting for Puzzles in the U.S. Long-Term Care Insurance Market
Koreshkova, Tatyana; Kopecky, Karen A.; Braun, R. Anton (2017-03-01)
Half of U.S. 50-year-olds will experience a nursing home stay before they die, and one in ten will incur out-of-pocket long-term care expenses in excess of $200,000. Surprisingly, only about 10% of individuals over age 62 have private long-term care insurance (LTCI). This paper proposes a quantitative equilibrium optimal contracting model of the LTCI market that features screening along the extensive margin. Frail and/or poor risk groups are ordered a single contract of no insurance that we refer to as a rejection. According to our model, rejections are the main reason that LTCI take-up rates ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2017-3

Working Paper
How Important Is Health Inequality for Lifetime Earnings Inequality?
Hosseini, Roozbeh; Kopecky, Karen A.; Zhao, Kai (2021-01-04)
Using a dynamic panel approach, we provide empirical evidence that negative health shocks reduce earnings. The effect is primarily driven by the participation margin and is concentrated in less educated individuals and those with poor health. We build a dynamic, general equilibrium, life cycle model that is consistent with these findings. In the model, individuals whose health is risky and heterogeneous choose to either work, or not work and apply for social security disability insurance (SSDI). Health affects individuals’ productivity, SSDI access, disutility from work, mortality, and ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-1

Report
Do consumers rely more heavily on credit cards while unemployed?
Cole, Allison (2016-12-20)
Leading up to the Great Recession, households increased their credit card debt by over 16 percent ($121 billion) during the five-year period from 2004 to 2009. The unemployment rate simultaneously began to rise in 2008, increasing from 5.0 percent in January 2008 to a high of 10.0 percent in October of 2009. During the recovery, from 2009 to 2014, credit card debt fell by more than 25 percent, as the unemployment rate returned to near prerecession levels. These coincident developments have led to speculation that consumers facing unemployment or job uncertainty may have increased their ...
Research Data Report , Paper 16-6

Working Paper
Misestimating House Values: Consequences for Household Finance
Corradin, Stefano; Vergara-Alert, Carles; Fillat, José (2025-10-01)
This study examines the effect of systematic household misestimation of home prices on financial decisions, including stockholdings, consumption, and asset allocation. Using exogenous variation in house values, mortgage debt, and homeowner misestimation identified through differences in local housing market characteristics, we find that a $60,000 increase in house overvaluation (approximately one standard deviation) results in a 1.1 to 1.9 percent decrease in risky stockholdings, a 1.5 to 4.3 percent increase in consumption, and a 1.3 to 2.5 percent increase in the share of risk-free assets ...
Working Papers , Paper 25-13

Working Paper
Occupation-level income shocks and asset returns: their covariance and implications for portfolio choice
Willen, Paul S.; Davis, Steven J. (2013-10-24)
This paper develops and applies a simple graphical approach to portfolio selection that accounts for covariance between asset returns and an investor's labor income. Our graphical approach easily handles income shocks that are partly hedgeable, multiple risky assets, multiple risky assets, many periods, and life cycle considerations.
Working Papers , Paper 13-9

Working Paper
Consumer revolving credit and debt over the life cycle and business cycle
Schuh, Scott; Fulford, Scott L. (2015-10-01)
Despite the centrality of credit and debt in the financial lives of Americans, little is known about how U.S. consumers' access and utilization of credit changes in the short and long term, and how these changes are related to changes in U.S. consumers' debt. This paper uses data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), which contains a 5 percent sample of every credit account in the United States from 1999 to 2014 from the credit reporting agency Equifax. It examines how changing credit availability, debt, and utilization over the business cycle and the life ...
Working Papers , Paper 15-17

Working Paper
Portfolio choice with house value misperception
Corradin, Stefano; Vergara-Alert, Carles; Fillat, José (2017-10-01)
Households systematically overvalue or undervalue their houses. We compute house value misperception as the difference between self-reported and market house values. Misperception is sizable, countercyclical, and persistent. We find that a 1 percent increase in house overvaluation results, on average, in a 4.56 percent decrease in the share of risky stock holdings for those households that participate in the stock market. We then build a rational inattention model in which households make decisions based on their perceived level of housing wealth. Numerical simulations generate the effects of ...
Working Papers , Paper 17-16

Working Paper
How important is variability in consumer credit limits?
Fulford, Scott L. (2010-06-01)
Credit limit variability is a crucial aspect of the consumption, savings, and debt decisions of households in the United States. Using a large panel, this paper first demonstrates that individuals gain and lose access to credit frequently and often have their credit limits reduced unexpectedly. Credit limit volatility is larger than most estimates of income volatility and varies over the business cycle. While typical models of intertemporal consumption fix the credit limit, I introduce a model with variable credit limits. Variable credit limits create a reason for households to hold both high ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-8

show more (87)

PREVIOUS / NEXT

Fed in Print

Search Results

FILTER BY YEAR

FILTER BY BANK

FILTER BY SERIES

FILTER BY CONTENT TYPE

FILTER BY AUTHOR

FILTER BY JEL CLASSIFICATION