IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/chf/rpseri/rp20114.html

Financial Returns to Household Inventory Management

Author

Listed:
  • Scott R. Baker

    (Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, Department of Finance)

  • Stephanie Johnson

    (Rice University, Jones School of Business)

  • Lorenz Kueng

    (University of Lugano - Faculty of Economics; Swiss Finance Institute; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management)

Abstract

Households tend to hold substantial amounts of non-financial assets in the form of inventory. Households can obtain significant financial returns from strategic shopping and optimally managing these inventories of consumer goods. 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 returns from inventory management at low levels of inventory, though returns decline rapidly as inventory levels increase. We provide evidence using scanner and survey data that supports this conclusion. High returns from inventory management that are declining in wealth offer a new rationale for poorer households not to participate in risky financial markets, while wealthier households invest in both financial assets and working capital.

Suggested Citation

  • Scott R. Baker & Stephanie Johnson & Lorenz Kueng, 2020. "Financial Returns to Household Inventory Management," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 20-114, Swiss Finance Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp20114
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3677084
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Alexander Kohlhas & Vladimir Asriyan, 2025. "The Macroeconomics of Data: Scale, Product Choice, and Pricing in the Information Age," Working Papers 1486, Barcelona School of Economics.
    2. J. Michael Collins & Amrita Kulka, 2023. "Saving by buying ahead: stockpiling in response to lump‐sum payments," Fiscal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 44(4), pages 451-484, December.
    3. repec:upd:utmpwp:033 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Vladimir Asriyan & Alexandre Kohlhas, 2025. "The macroeconomics of data: Scale, product choice, and pricing in the information age," Economics Working Papers 1904, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    5. Francesca Parodi, 2024. "Consumption Tax Cuts In A Recession," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 65(1), pages 117-148, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • G51 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Household Savings, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • D14 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Saving; Personal Finance
    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • D11 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Theory
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp20114. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ridima Mittal (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fameech.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.