Using new transaction data, I find considerable deviations from consumption smoothing in response to large, regular, predetermined, and salient payments from the Alaska Permanent Fund. On average, the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is 25% for nondurables and services within one quarter of the payments. The MPC is heterogeneous, monotonically increasing with income, and the average is largely driven by high-income households with substantial amounts of liquid assets, who have MPCs above 50%. The account-level data and the properties of the payments rule out most previous explanations of excess sensitivity, including buffer stock models and rational inattention. How big are these “mistakes?” Using a sufficient statistics approach, I show that the welfare loss from excess sensitivity depends on the MPC and the relative payment size as a fraction of income. Since the lump-sum payments do not depend on income, the two statistics are negatively correlated such that the welfare losses are similar across households and small (less than 0.1% of wealth), despite the large MPCs.

How households shift spending across firms in response to income fluctuations is an important source of firm risk. Using transaction-level data, we study how households interact with the universe of retailers following income changes. We find that income increases within and across households result in substitution toward retailers in a category that are higher quality; smaller; more profitable; and have higher labor intensity, research and development (R&D) intensity, and equity betas. Although not all shifts are economically large, they do not average out across retailers. Thus, retailer choice has implications for key financial and macroeconomic outcomes, such as aggregate profitability and labor demand.

Households tend to hold substantial amounts of non-financial assets in the form of consumer goods inventories that are unobserved by traditional measures of wealth, about $725 on average for products covered by our sample. Such holdings can eclipse total financial assets among households in the lowest income quintile. Households can obtain significant financial returns from strategically shopping and managing these inventories. In addition, they choose to maintain liquid savings—household working capital—not just for precautionary motives but also to support this inventory management. We demonstrate that households earn high marginal returns from investing in household working capital, well above 20% at low levels of inventory, though these marginal returns decline rapidly as inventory increases. Nevertheless, average returns from inventory management are high—about 50% for the typical household—and affect household portfolio returns substantially for all but the top income and asset quintiles. We provide evidence from scanner and survey data that supports this conclusion. For many households, working capital is therefore an important asset class that has been largely ignored by the household finance literature, and inventory management provides them with an alternative to investing in risky financial markets at low levels of liquid wealth.

Many research papers in household finance utilize annual snapshots of household wealth from administrative data, such as tax registries, to calculate “imputed consumption.” However, trading costs, unobserved intrayear trades, or unobserved security characteristics may cause measurement error. We document how such errors vary across groups of individuals by income, portfolio characteristics, and wealth and how they are correlated with individual income and balance sheets, asset prices, and the business cycle using transaction-level retail brokerage account data. We find that the economic significance of imputation error is small in many research settings, and we discuss robustness checks and econometric specifications to minimize the impact of imputation error in future research.