Asymmetric Consumption Smoothing

Baugh is with the College of Business, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Ben-David is with the Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Park is with the Faculty of Business and Economics, the University of Melbourne. Parker is with the Sloan School of Management, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and NBER. Early versions of this paper were titled "A Test of Consumption Smoothing and Liquidity Constraints: Spending Responses to Paying Taxes and Receiving Refunds." We thank the online account aggregator for providing the data set. For helpful comments, we thank Manuel Adelino, Sumit Agarwal, Michael Boutros, Andrew Chen, Peter Ganong, Uri Gneezy, Damon Jones, Olivia Kim, Emi Nakamura, Scott Nelson, Pascal Noel, Michaela Pagel, Michael Palumbo, Joel Slemrod, René Stulz, and particularly our discussant, Annette Vissing Jorgensen, as well as participants in seminars at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, The Ohio State University, and the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank Payments Conference, the Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association 2018, and the JPMorgan Chase Institute 2018 Academic Conference. We are grateful for support from a NBER Household Finance Grant, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, and the Dice Center at the Fisher College of Business. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• September 19, 2018
• January 30, 2020