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The Effect Of Public Pension Wealth On Saving And Expenditure, Marta Lachowska, Michał Myck
The Effect Of Public Pension Wealth On Saving And Expenditure, Marta Lachowska, Michał Myck
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
This paper examines the degree of substitution between public pension wealth and private saving by studying Poland’s 1999 pension reform. The analysis identifies the effect of pension wealth on private saving using cohort-by-time variation in pension wealth induced by the reform. The estimates, which are based on the 1997–2003 Polish Household Budget Surveys, show that 1 Polish zloty (PLN) less of pension wealth increases household saving by 0.3 PLN. Among highly-educated households, pension wealth and private saving appear to be close substitutes.
Expenditure, Confidence, And Uncertainty: Identifying Shocks To Consumer Confidence Using Daily Data, Marta Lachowska
Expenditure, Confidence, And Uncertainty: Identifying Shocks To Consumer Confidence Using Daily Data, Marta Lachowska
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this question by using high-frequency microdata on spending and consumer confidence, and I find that consumer confidence contains information relevant to predicting spending, independent from other indicators. The exogenous movements in consumer confidence lead to very short fluctuations in consumer spending, consistent with the hypothesis that more consumer confidence reflects less uncertainty about the future.