Intertemporal Choice and Consumption Mobility
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 the empirical and the theoretical transition matrix of the consumption distribution. The transition matrix generated by our estimates matches remarkably well the empirical matrix, both in the aggregate and in samples stratified by education. Our estimates strongly reject the consumption insurance model and suggest that households smooth income shocks to a lesser extent than implied by the permanent income hypothesis. (JEL: D52, D91, I30)
منابع مشابه
Investigation on Habit Formation, Risk Aversion and Intertemporal Substitution in Consumption of Iranian Households by GMM Approach
Consumption is the principal feature of Iranâs Gross National Production. Therefore, recognizing of factors that influence it is quite crucial. This article, investigates habit formation, durability, relative risk aversion and intertemporal substitution in consumption expenditures of Iranian households. For empirical study, at first, we constructed two weighted portfolio of the main assets re...
متن کاملIntertemporal Choice and the Cross Sectional Variance of Marginal Utility
The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide an explicit test of this hypothesis. Our approach circumvents the necessity to identify a pure age pro...
متن کاملThe 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...
متن کاملElasticity of Intertemporal Substitution: An Investigation in Iran
We[1] present estimates of the Elasticity of Intertemporal Substitution (EIS) for Iranian households using synthetic cohort panels based on household micro-data. Results show significant difference with the common values used in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models which are originally based on estimated values for developed countries. We show that this difference has important ...
متن کاملRobust Consumption and Portfolio Choice for Time Varying Investment Opportunities
This paper examines a continuous-time intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem for an investor with recursive preferences. The investor worries about model misspecification and seeks robust decision rules. The expected excess return of a risky asset follows a mean-reverting process. I find that whether the concern about model misspecification decreases the total demand for equitie...
متن کامل