Is Consumption Growth Consistent with Intertemporal Optimization? Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey

In this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are not inconsistent with the patterns of non-durable expenditure observed in US household-level data. Our results and our approach are new in several respects. First, we use the only US micro data set which has direct and complete information on household consumption. The microeconomic data sets used in most of the consumption literature so far contained either very limited information on consumption (like the PSID) or none at all, in which case consumption had to be obtained indirectly from income and changes in assets. Second, we propose a flexible and novel specification of preferences which is easily estimable and allows a general treatment jof multiple commodities. We show that aggregation over commodities can be important, both theoretically and in practice. Third, we present empirical results that show that it is possible to find a reasonably simple specification of preferences, which controls for the effects of changes in demographics and labor supply behavior over the life cycle and which is not rejected by the available data. On our preferred specification, we obtain sharp estimates of key behavioral parameters (including the elasticity of intertemporal substitution) and no rejections of theoretical restrictions. Our results contrast sharply with most of the previous evidence, which has typically been interpreted as rejection of the theory. We show that previous rejections can be explained by the simplifying assumptions made to derive empirically tractable equations. We also show that results obtained using food consumption or aggregate data can be extremely misleading.

Intertemporal Consumption Choices, Transaction Costs and Limited Participation to Financial Markets: Reconciling Data and Theory

This paper builds a unifying framework that, within the theory of intertemporal consumption choices, brings together the limited participation -based explanation of the poor empirical performance of the C-CAPM and the transaction costs-based explanation of incomplete portfolios. Using the implications of the consumption model and observed household consumption and portfolio choices, we identify the preference parameters of interest and a lower bound for the costs rationalizing non-participation in financial markets, in the presence of unobserved heterogeneity in tastes for consumption and portfolio allocation. Using the US Consumer Expenditure Survey and assuming isoelastic preferences, we estimate the coefficient of relative risk aversion at 1.7 and a cost bound of 0.4 percent of non-durable consumption. Our estimate of the preference parameter is theoretically plausible and the bound sufficiently small to be likely to be exceeded by the actual total (observable and unobservable) costs of participating to financial markets.

Sacudidas salariales y variabilidad del consumo en México durante los años 90

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se presentan elementos de juicio sobre la relación entre las sacudidas económicas y el salario relativo de los varones y los cambios de consumo de los hogares en México durante los años 90, un período caracterizado por una inestabilidad elevada. Además de realizar esta clase de análisis con México por primera vez, el trabajo presenta dos aportes principales. El primero es el uso de fuentes alternativas de datos para construir variables instrumentales de salarios. El segundo es analizar las diferencias entre cuatro categorías de consumo: bienes perecederos, bienes no perecederos, educación y salud. Nuestros resultados en cuanto al consumo de bienes perecederos rechazan la hipótesis de que los hogares mexicanos son capaces de asegurarse contra el riesgo idiosincrásico. En cuanto a las comparaciones entre categorías de consumo, la conclusión es que en México los hogares tienden a reaccionar a sacudidas pasajeras contrayendo el consumo de bienes que representan inversiones de más largo plazo en el capital humano, lo que los hace más vulnerables en el futuro.

Differential Mortality in the UK

In this paper we use the two waves of the British Retirement Survey (1988/89 and 1994) to quantify the relationship between socio-economic status and health outcomes. We find that, even after conditioning on the initial health status, wealth rankings are important determinants of mortality and the evolution of the health indicator in the survey. For men aged 65 moving from the 40th percentile to the 60th percentile in the wealth distribution increases the probability of survival by between 2.4 and 3.4 percentage points depending on the measure of wealth used. A slightly smaller effect is found for women of between 1.5 and 1.9 percentage points. In the process of estimating these effects we control for non-random attrition from our sample.

Do Public Transfers Crowd Out Private Transfers? Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Mexico

Private transfers, Crowding-out, Public programmes

An Asset-Based Approach to the Analysis of Poverty in Latin America

Poverty reduction remains one of the main challenges for Latin America at the end of the 20th century. Most of the countries in the region are classified as middle income by international standards, and yet they register poverty rates well above what would be expected given their GDP per capita. The reason for this "excess poverty" lies in the high inequality in the distribution of resources.

The Demographic Transition in Closed and Open Economies: A Tale of Two Regions

This paper constructs a general equilibrium overlapping generation model to evaluate quantitatively how demographic transition (falling mortality and fertility rates) affects aggregate variables (wages, interest rate, output), and inter-generational welfare in closed and open economies. We perform this analysis for two economies calibrated to resemble the North (US and Europe) and Latin America. Our simulations suggest that the demographic transition could have generated income per capita growth up to 0. 5% per year in excess of steady-state growth in the past 50 years in Latin America and 0. 3% in the North.

IRAs and Household Saving Revisited: Some New Evidence

The effectiveness of tax-favored savings accounts in raising national savings depends crucially upon the willingness of households to reduce consumption in order to finance contributions to these accounts. The debate over the tax deductibility of IRA's has centered on whether IRA contributions represented new savings or reshuffled assets. We devise a test to distinguish between these two hypotheses where we compare the behavior of households which just opened an IRA account with that of households which already had an IRA account. Our test accounts for any unobservable heterogeneity across the two groups. We find evidence that supports the view that households financed their IRA contributions primarily through reductions in their stocks of other assets. Our results indicate that less than 20% of IRA contributions represented addition to national savings.

Differential Mortality and Wealth Accumulation

The issue of asset accumulation and decumulation is central to the life cycle theory of consumer behavior and to many policy questions. One of the main implications of the life cycle model is that assets are decumulated in the last part of life. Most empirical studies in this area use cross-sectional data of estimate mean or median wealth-age profiles. The use of cross-sections to estimate the age profile of assets is full of pitfalls. For example, if wealth and mortality are related, in that poorer individuals die younger, one overestimates the last part of the wealth-age profile when using cross-sectional data because means (or other measures of location) are taken over a population which becomes 'richer' as it ages. This paper examines the effect of differential mortality on cross-sectional estimates of wealth-age profiles. Our approach is to quantify the dependence of mortality rates on wealth and use these estimates to 'correct' wealth-age profiles for sample selection due to differential mortality. We estimate mortality rates as a function of wealth and age for a sample of married couples drawn from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Our results show that accounting for differential mortality produces wealth profiles with significantly more dissaving among the elderly.

The Intertemporal Allocation of Consumption: Theory and Evidence

Liquidity constraints and, more generally, imperfections in credit markets, can be extremely important for the intertemporal allocation of consumption and have received a substantial amount of attention in the theoretical and empirical literature on consumption. In the first part of the paper I review the reasons why liquidity constraints are important. Unfortunately, for several reasons, it is not easy to test for the presence of liquidity constraints. Aggregation issues preclude the use of aggregate time series data for such a purpose. Tests based on micro data, however, are complicated by some serious identification problems. If a simple equilibrium model does not fit some data set, one can change the assumptions about the opportunity set available to the economic agents or the specification of their preferences. For instance, empirical evidence that detects excess sensitivity of consumption to income could be explained by liquidity constraints or by non separability between consumption and leisure. However, the available evidence shows that it is possible to find flexible specifications of preferences that fit consumption movements at business cycle frequencies. I also present some simulation evidence that shows that for many plausible parameter configurations, liquidity constraints are likely to be relevant only for a few economic agents. In the last part of the paper I present some new evidence on the relevance of liquidity constraints based on debt holding data. The data indicate that the demand for debt of individuals more likely to be liquidity constrained is less elastic to changes in the interest rate.