Jonathan D. Fisher

The Retirement Consumption Conundrum: Evidence from a Consumption Survey

Recent studies have shown that food consumption declines at retirement. We use broader definitions of consumption from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and find that the so-called retirement consumption puzzle is solved by using comprehensive consumption data.

Consumption Mobility in the United States: Evidence from Two Panel Data Sets

Abstract This paper examines inequality and mobility using measures of income and consumption. Consumption is claimed to be a better measure of permanent income and thus well-being, but most studies of inequality and mobility using U.S. data use income.This paper uses cohort data from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys on total consumption to impute consumption in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Then, we use this imputed consumption and actual income from the PSID to examine changes in inequality and mobility. Similar to earlier findings, we show that there has been a large increase in income inequality but no concurrent increase in consumption inequality in the 1990s. Conversely, income mobility and consumption mobility are similar during this time period.Finally, we link the concepts of inequality and mobility using a social welfare function. The results suggest that income mobility and consumption mobility more than offset the increases in inequality.

Identifying the Poorest Older Americans

OBJECTIVES Public policies target a subset of the population defined as poor or needy, but rarely are people poor or needy in the same way. This is particularly true among older adults. This study investigates poverty among older adults in order to identify who among them is financially worst off. METHODS We use 20 years of data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to examine the income and consumption of older Americans. RESULTS The poverty rate is cut in fourth if both income and consumption are used to define poverty. Those most likely to be poor defined by only income but not poor defined by income and consumption together are married, White, and homeowners and have a high school diploma or higher. The income poor alone display sufficient assets to raise consumption above poverty thresholds, whereas the consumption poor are shown to have income just above the poverty threshold and few assets. DISCUSSION The poorest among the older population are those who are income and consumption poor. Understanding the nature of this double poverty population is important in measuring the success of future public policies to reduce poverty among this group.

The Consumption Effects Associated with Filing for Personal Bankruptcy

This article examines the response of food consumption to filing for personal bankruptcy in the spirit of previous work on the benefits of other social-insurance programs. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that an increase in the financial benefit to filing for bankruptcy increases the growth in food consumption. In addition, we find that filing under chapter 7 of the bankruptcy code provides consumption insurance, while filing under chapter 13 of the bankruptcy code provides no significant consumption benefits.

Marital status and the decision to file for personal bankruptcy: A duration model approach

This paper examines how changes in marital status and the length of time in current marital status affect the probability of filing for personal bankruptcy. The results show that the probability of filing differs significantly by marital status. Divorced households are more likely to file in the first two years after divorce while married households and single households file later in their tenure. A further contribution of this paper is that it represents the first use of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine whether there is duration dependence in personal bankruptcy.

Home Maintenance and Investment Decisions

The owned home is often the largest asset in a household’s portfolio. To maintain its value, the home requires continual reinvestment, and a homeowner can increase its value through renovations and additions. Empirical research on these home maintenance and investment decisions of the household has relied almost exclusively on the American Housing Survey (AHS). The research presented in this article added a new data set to this literature, the Consumer Expenditure (CE) Survey, using quarterly household data from 1984 to the first quarter of 2005. In the article, we first compare results between the AHS and CE Survey using some stylized facts identified in the literature. Then we move beyond this comparison and highlight some strengths of the CE Survey, including the distinct time-series patterns observed in the quarterly data.

Information and credit access: using bankruptcy as a signal

Legally, a bankruptcy flag can appear on an individuals credit report for up to 10 years after the filing. The flag affects an individuals credit score, and in turn, an individuals access to credit. In this article, we investigate how the bankruptcy flag affects access to credit along three dimensions–loan acceptance, the price of the loan as is determined by the interest rate, and the amount of credit the household receives. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the Survey of Consumer Finances, we estimate a series of two-stage models corrected for sample selection and adjusted to account for the households level of creditworthiness. We find that the bankruptcy flag increases the probability of being denied access to a loan. The flag also increases interest rates for unsecured loans and lowers the credit limits available to households. The findings have important implications with respect to current bankruptcy code and the impact that information, such as the bankruptcy flag, can have on the efficiency of the credit markets.

The Ability of Women to Repay Debt After Divorce

SUMMARY This study uses questions on household repayment problems from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how the transition from marriage to divorce affects default rates by gender. The results show that divorced women are more likely to have repayment problems than divorced men and married-couple households. Further analysis reveals that divorced women who are receiving welfare are significantly less likely to default. Because average welfare benefits decreased in the early 1990s, the results suggest that this decrease provides a partial explanation for why the default rate increased between 1991 and 1995 for divorced women. The effect of welfare on the default rates of divorced men and married couples is insignificant. And there is no evidence that receiving child support and alimony payments significantly affects the probability of default.

Inequality in 3-D : Income, Consumption, and Wealth

We do not need to and should not have to choose amongst income, consumption, or wealth as the superior measure of well-being. All three individually and jointly determine well-being. We are the first to study inequality in three conjoint dimensions for the same households, using income, consumption, and wealth from the 1989-2016 Surveys of Consumer Finances (SCF). The paper focuses on two questions. What does inequality in two and three dimensions look like? Has inequality in multiple dimensions increased by less, by more, or by about the same as inequality in any one dimension? We find an increase in inequality in two dimensions and in three dimensions, with a faster increase in multi-dimensional inequality than in one-dimensional inequality. Viewing inequality through one dimension greatly understates the level and the growth in inequality in two and three dimensions. The U.S. is becoming more economically unequal than is generally understood.