Essays on Household Saving and Pension Reform

This thesis consists of three chapters on topics related to household consumption and saving. Underlying all papers is the computation of household-level consumption and saving using a detailed third-party reported administrative dataset from Icelandic tax records. The first chapter of the thesis studies households’ consumption response to past experiences of economic hardship. The second chapter estimates a life-cycle consumption profile for three education groups and proceeds to estimate their consumption response out of transitory income shock over a period of dramatic economic fluctuations. Finally, the third chapter asks whether raising mandatory pension saving leads households to reduce their voluntary saving as predicted by canonical economic models.