In this thesis I contribute to the applied study of households' consumption and saving behaviour. In the first chapter I introduce and explain why it is relevant to understand how households react to income shocks in terms of their consumption and saving decisions. The second chapter is inspired by a recent paper by Krueger and Perri (2011), who argue that the observed response of household wealth to income shocks, which is smaller over long periods, provides evidence in favour of the classic permanent-income model with perfect financial markets. Whether a model with financial market imperfections, however, such as the standard incomplete-markets model with liquidity constraints, can also generate such a wealth response crucially depends on the importance of precautionary wealth accumulation. I structurally estimate a model with a precautionary- savings motive and show that it can generate the observed wealth responses in the data. I further show that the wealth responses to income shocks do not allow us to rule out financial market imperfections. In the third chapter I extend the analysis, studying empirically what can be learned from international evidence on the way in which households react to income. I use detailed panel data from newly available surveys of Chile, Spain and the United States. Although it compares three different countries with dissimilar levels of development in their financial markets, the evidence suggests that the amount of precautionary savings in these economies is low and that household behaviour is not strongly influenced by the presence of borrowing constraints. The structural estimation for all countries suggests a low target level of wealth resulting from high levels of impatience or low levels of risk aversion. In the fourth chapter I extend the analysis to the real estate properties owned by the households. I revisit the Italian data, building on Kaplan and Violante (2014) who have argued that a substantial fraction of wealthy households with illiquid wealth, such as real estate, behave as hand-to-mouth consumers. In exploring the data, I find that, in the Italian sample, households which adjust their illiquid wealth show responses to income shocks like permanent-income consumers. Instead households which do not adjust their illiquid wealth, and whose behaviour in general can thus not be characterised by the first order conditions, show responses to income shocks which suggest a stronger precautionary-saving motive, such as wealthy hand-to-mouth consumers might be expected to show. The fifth chapter provides the conclusions of the thesis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 369-380). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

As electronics and appliances in the home continue to evolve, wireless networks that can monitor and control these are becoming more prevalent. Development platforms for technologies like RF4CE and ZigBee are becoming more available but can still be costly for a complete platform that supports interoperable devices with public ZigBee profiles. This paper details the design and implementation of a ZigBee Home Automation network using free tools on a low cost ZigBee development platform. The platform utilizes a dedicated processor for the ZigBee stack with SPI, UART, and USB interface, allowing the application code that was developed to be integrated into a wide variety of environments. / text

<p>This dissertation consists of two essays investigating participation effects in household financial decisions. In the first essay, entitled "Household Mortgage Choice and Mortgage Market Participation," I empirically study a household's choice of an adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) over a fixed rate mortgage (FRM) across time. This decision has been investigated in the cross-section previously, but to date, no one has studied how a household's choice of mortgage contract type changes as they gain experience in the mortgage market. This study investigates whether mortgage market participation has a systematic effect on the choice of an ARM vs. an FRM within a household. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), I document a novel stylized fact: a household's propensity to choose an adjustable rate ARM over an FRM increases with the number of previous mortgages the household has used. Households do not choose an ARM due to budget or liquidity constraints when increasing housing consumption; nor is the observed pattern of increased propensity to choose an ARM with mortgage market participation explained by the simultaneous relaxation of budget constraints as homeowners participate in the mortgage market. Stabilization of a household's income stream and rising home prices are also ruled out as the source of increasing ARM choice propensity with greater utilization of mortgages, as is expected length of tenure. Evidence is presented supporting the hypothesis that households learn about mortgage products by participating in the market.</p><p>In the second essay, entitled "Participation Effects in Refinancing Decisions", I investigate household refinancing decisions in the context of market participation. Using optimal refinance interest rate differentials as derived in Agarwal, Driscoll and Laibson (2013), I document an important participation effect in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, whereby households with greater mortgage market participation, as measured by previous mortgages used, are more likely to refinance optimally. This result is robust to potential liquidity constraints, where the household fails to refinance due to an inability to pay any fixed costs associated with the transaction. Participation effects persist even when controlling for the potential of equity extraction as the primary motivation for refinancing. These results are consistent with an information acquisition model, whereby households gain knowledge and understanding of financial transactions by participating in financial markets.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-237). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ86292

published_or_final_version / Geography / Master / Master of Arts in China Development Studies

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