Date of Submission

Spring 2017

Academic Programs and Concentrations

Economics

Project Advisor 1

Olivier Giovanni

Abstract/Artist's Statement

In this paper, we examine the phenomenon known as the wealth effect and its impact on consumption. By using quarterly data from the United States economy, we investigate the impact of financial and housing wealth on consumption. With variable selection based on a paper by Matteo Iacoviello, and expanding the sample size by including the periods from the first quarter of 1952 to the last quarter of 2016, we found evidence that shows both financial wealth and housing wealth have an impact on consumption. Although the data specifically shows housing wealth had a higher impact, the final results seemed to be somewhat inconclusive because each method of integration had a slightly different outcome. In our basic model using the OLS method of integration consistently showed housing wealth had a larger impact on consumption, while the results of the ARDL and Co-integration estimates varied. These results are in agreement with some of the literature but do not include some of the micro economic variables that might have made the results more conclusive. Finally, we take a look at some of the implications of the wealth effect and how they go past just an increase in consumption.\

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On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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