Survey data on household finance and consumption - research summary and policy use

The first part of this paper provides a brief survey of the recent literature that employs survey data on household finance and consumption. Given the breadth of the topic, it focuses on issues that are particularly relevant for policy, namely i) wealth effects on consumption, ii) housing prices and household indebtedness, iii) retirement income, consumption and pension reforms, iv) access to credit and credit constraints, v) financial innovation, consumption smoothing and portfolio selection and vi) wealth inequality. The second part uses concrete examples to summarise how results from such surveys feed into policy-making within the central banks that already conduct such surveys. JEL Classification: C42, D12, D14.Household finance, consumption, survey data.

Consumption

Macroeconomic research on consumption has been influenced profoundly by rational expectations. First, rational expectations together with the hypothesis of constant expected real interest rates implies that consumption should evolve as a random walk. Much of the research of the past decade has been devoted to testing the random walk hypothesis and to explaining its failure. Three branches of the literature have developed. The first relies on the durability of consumption to explain deviations from the random walk property. The second invokes liquidity constraints which block consumers from the credit market transactions needed to make consumption follow a random walk when income fluctuates up and down. The third branch dispenses with the assumption that expected real interest rates are constant. It attempts to explain deviations from the random walk in terms of intertemporal substitution.

Materials Selection of 3D Printing Filament and Utilization of Recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) in a Redesigned Breadboard

The demand for a novel and sustainable alternative materials for 3D printer filaments has been knowingly increasing. One alternative source for the filament is to reuse and recycle post-consumer plastic products, which is also a compelling approach to conserve energy and sustain the environment. Thus, this study is focused on the materials selection of virgin polymer resins and recycled post-consumer plastics for use in 3D printer filaments. A multi-criteria decision method of Elimination and Choice Expressing the Reality (ELECTRE) was utilized to determine the best materials for 3D printer filaments. The study has shown that the virgin low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are optimal materials as an alternative filament among other options such as virgin high-density polyethylene (HDPE), virgin PET, virgin polypropylene (PP) and recycled HDPE. Aside from the different options of the type of materials, the various properties considered in the calculation include tensile strength, melting point, glass transition temperature, melt flow index, coefficient of thermal expansion, and cost. Moreover, a redesigned breadboard was produced thru 3D printing using a recycled PET as filament source

Consumption

This body of work is neither a chronicle of my eating disorder, nor a record of my recovery. The oil paintings and graphite drawings that make up this exhibition, seek to explore my difficult, complicated, and often self-contradictory relationship with food, and how it affects my relationships with my friends and with myself. I am particularly interested in eating rituals. These are the sets of cultural prescriptions for the ways in which food and the process of eating can define a social interaction. Ice cream picnics, brunch dates, and Instagram snapshots all lie at the heart of my culture\u27s social expectations, uncomfortably alongside notions of body positivity, and a twisting, hypocritical rhetoric of what the female body is allowed to look like and do in public. Eating rituals have always been a challenge for me to navigate. When I was a patient at an eating disorder clinic, they were my most loathsome chore. In contrast, I look back on meals with dear ones as some of my happiest memories. Social eating is always tinged with anxiety for me, but now it is almost always the high point of my day. In my art, I seek to explore the many different rituals I perform that remove food from the category of survival necessity, and enter it into the realm of spiritual experience. Food is a symbol; it binds societies together, and links humans both with animals and the divine. In my work I employ the mechanisms of food symbolism to engage in dialog with art history, and with contemporary ideas about the female body and disordered eating. Consumption is not just about the physical act. Even before the rise of social media, we were encouraged to consume each other\u27s lives, and symbolically, each other\u27s bodies. The academic traditions of painting female nudes and memento mori still lifes are each testament to that. I borrow motifs, imagery and (to an extent) technique from the history of academic European painting in order to lend an air of authority to my works that are often frivolous in subject matter. I depict my interactions with food and relationships with my peers in a way in which their seriousness and significance cannot be contested. In rendering these images realistically, even photo-realistically at times, I am laying bare my obsessive personality (that which has always been susceptible to control issues such as eating disorder), channeling it into something creative instead of destructive, and encouraging the viewer to think more deeply about their own visual and gastronomical consumption

Consumption

Overall, this book proposes a new global framework that is vital to understanding how deeply alcohol was involved in central processes shaping the modern world

Consumption

http://jeunessejournal.ca/index.php?journal=yptc&page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=26