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Prof. Benjamin Moll, Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics

Scientific Sense ®

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Are All People in the Economy Not Financially Constrained?

The key assumption that you're kind of making is essentially that all people in the economy are sort of not financially constrained, meaning if they want to borrow an extra dollar, they can do so. But what we see in the data is that there's a lot of people who look like what the people in literature call hand to mouth. And then these hand to mouth people essentially, because they're exactly constrained and they can sort of inter-temply substitute, they're going to respond very strongly to income changes. If you give someone who's hand to mouth an extradollar, he's going to eat it. That's exactly the difference to the representative agent models.

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