The aim of this paper is to understand what a recession means for individual consumers, and to model in a life-cycle framework how individuals respond to recessions.

Concern that too little saving is done by a significant number of UK households has long been a motivation for government policy. However, any intervention by policy makers designed to increase household saving rates should ideally be based on high quality evidence on the efficacy of different policies. A new British Academy policy centre report authored by IFS researchers examines the evidence for different types of policy to promote household savings: financial incentives, education, 'nudges' and social marketing. Despite the obvious importance attached to the issue in the UK and internationally, the report concludes that significant gaps in the evidence base remain.

This report looks at evidence on policies to encourage household saving. The report examines in detail what is known - and what is not known - about the effectiveness of four types of intervention designed to raise saving by households: financial incentives; education; choice architecture; and social marketing.

These slides were presented at the British Academy in London, 22 February 2012.

We show in a tractable life-cycle model how the optimal unemployment replacement ratio and the fall in consumption on job loss depend on the cost of self-insurance and the cost of borrowing.

This presentation was delivered on November 23rd at University College Dublin.

This presentation was given at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summer Institute 2010.

Most families accumulated very little liquid wealth between 2000 and 2005 according to new research published today by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and funded by the IFS Retirement Saving Consortium.

This report looks at the level of wealth and the rate of saving of households in the UK on the eve of the global economic crisis.

Considerable variation in the amount of wealth that households hold and how they hold it means that some will have been more exposed to falling asset prices during 2008 and 2009 than others. We estimate that the best off will have lost most.