Optimal consumption choice with intertemporal substitution

Optimal Consumption Choice under Uncertainty with Intertemporal Substitution†

We extend the analysis of the intertemporal utilitymaximization problem for HindyHuang-Kreps utilities reported in Bank and Riedel (1998) to the stochastic case. Existence and uniqueness of optimal consumption plans are established under arbitrary convex portfolio constraints, including the cases of both complete and incomplete markets. For the complete market setting, Kuhn-Tucker-like necessar...

Intertemporal Choice and Consumption Mobility

The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We estimate the parameters that minimize the distance between th...

The Role of Risk Aversion and Intertemporal Substitution in Dynamic Consumption-Portfolio Choice with Recursive Utility∗

The objective of this note is to understand the implications for consumption and portfolio choice of the separation of an investor’s risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution that is made possible by recursive utility, in contrast to expected utility where the two are dictated by the same parameter. In particular, we study whether the optimal dynamic consumption and portfolio d...

Optimal Intertemporal Consumption under Uncertainty

We analyze the optimal consumption program of an infinitely lived consumer who maximizes the discounted sum of utilities subject to a sequence of budget constraints where both the interest rate and his income are stochastic. We show that if the income and interest rate processes are sufficiently stochastic and the long run average rate of interest is greater than or equal to the discount rate, ...

Intertemporal Choice