IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/edn/esedps/193.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Evolution of Consumption Volatility for the Liquidity Constrained Households over 1983 to 2004

Author

Abstract

We study whether the increased income uncertainty in the US over the last quarter-century had a negative impact on household welfare by looking at variability of household consumption growth. We are particularly interested in understanding the effect of greater uncertainty on the liquidity constrained households. We study the evolution of liquidity constraints in the US in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, greatly extending Jappelli et al. [1998] methodology on how to construct such measures using information from the Survey of Consumer Finances. We find that although household indebtedness increased substantially, reflecting greater availability of credit, there was no decline in the proportion of liquidity constrained households between 1983 and 2007. Applying methodology developed in Gorbachev [2009], we find that the evolution of consumption volatility for the liquidity constrained households increased by economically and statistically more than for the unconstrained households. This increase was lower than that of family income volatility for these groups. Nevertheless, the welfare cost to society is substantial: we estimate that an average household would be willing to sacrifice 2.35 percent of nondurable consumption per year to lower consumption risk to its 1984 levels.

Suggested Citation

  • Olga Gorbachev & Keshav Dogra, 2009. "Evolution of Consumption Volatility for the Liquidity Constrained Households over 1983 to 2004," Edinburgh School of Economics Discussion Paper Series 193, Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh.
    • Handle: RePEc:edn:esedps:193
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/id193_esedps.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Costas Meghir & Luigi Pistaferri, 2004. "Income Variance Dynamics and Heterogeneity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(1), pages 1-32, January.
    2. Fissel, Gary S & Jappelli, Tullio, 1990. "Do Liquidity Constraints Vary over Time? Evidence from Survey and Panel Data," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 22(2), pages 253-262, May.
    3. Peter Gottschalk & Robert Moffitt, 2009. "The Rising Instability of U.S. Earnings," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 23(4), pages 3-24, Fall.
    4. Zeldes, Stephen P, 1989. "Consumption and Liquidity Constraints: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 97(2), pages 305-346, April.
    5. Orazio P. Attanasio & Hamish Low, 2004. "Estimating Euler Equations," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 7(2), pages 405-435, April.
    6. Susan Dynarski & Jonathan Gruber, 1997. "Can Families Smooth Variable Earnings?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 28(1), pages 229-303.
    7. Robert A. Moffitt & Peter Gottschalk, 1995. "Trends in the Variances of Permanent and Transitory Earnings in the U.S. and Their Relation to Earnings Mobility," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 444, Boston College Department of Economics, revised 01 Nov 1998.
    8. Arellano, Manuel & Bover, Olympia, 1995. "Another look at the instrumental variable estimation of error-components models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 68(1), pages 29-51, July.
    9. William Adams & Liran Einav & Jonathan Levin, 2009. "Liquidity Constraints and Imperfect Information in Subprime Lending," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(1), pages 49-84, March.
    10. Robert Moffitt & John Karl Scholz, 2010. "Trends in the Level and Distribution of Income Support," NBER Chapters, in: Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 24, pages 111-152, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    11. Olga Gorbachev, 2011. "Did Household Consumption Become More Volatile?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2248-2270, August.
    12. David B. Gross & Nicholas S. Souleles, 2002. "Do Liquidity Constraints and Interest Rates Matter for Consumer Behavior? Evidence from Credit Card Data," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(1), pages 149-185.
    13. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Arthur Lewbel, 1997. "Quadratic Engel Curves And Consumer Demand," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(4), pages 527-539, November.
    14. Tullio Jappelli & Jörn-Steffen Pischke & Nicholas S. Souleles, 1998. "Testing For Liquidity Constraints In Euler Equations With Complementary Data Sources," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 80(2), pages 251-262, May.
    15. Attanasio, Orazio P & Weber, Guglielmo, 1995. "Is Consumption Growth Consistent with Intertemporal Optimization? Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(6), pages 1121-1157, December.
    16. Mark Doms & John Krainer, 2007. "Innovations in mortgage markets and increased spending on housing," Working Paper Series 2007-05, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
    17. Haider, Steven J, 2001. "Earnings Instability and Earnings Inequality of Males in the United States: 1967-1991," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 19(4), pages 799-836, October.
    18. Milton Friedman, 1957. "A Theory of the Consumption Function," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number frie57-1, March.
    19. Shin, Donggyun & Solon, Gary, 2011. "Trends in men's earnings volatility: What does the Panel Study of Income Dynamics show?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(7-8), pages 973-982, August.
    20. Nickell, Stephen J, 1981. "Biases in Dynamic Models with Fixed Effects," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 49(6), pages 1417-1426, November.
    21. Duca, John V. & Rosenthal, Stuart S., 1994. "Borrowing constraints and access to owner-occupied housing," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 301-322, June.
    22. Meghir, Costas & Weber, Guglielmo, 1996. "Intertemporal Nonseparability or Borrowing Restrictions? A Disaggregate Analysis Using a U.S. Consumption Panel," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(5), pages 1151-1181, September.
    23. Shane T. Jensen & Stephen H. Shore, 2008. "Changes in the Distribution of Income Volatility," Papers 0808.1090, arXiv.org.
    24. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Agar Brugiavini, 2001. "Risk Pooling, Precautionary Saving and Consumption Growth," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 68(4), pages 757-779.
    25. Dynan Karen & Elmendorf Douglas & Sichel Daniel, 2012. "The Evolution of Household Income Volatility," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 12(2), pages 1-42, December.
    26. Campbell, Jeffrey R. & Hercowitz, Zvi, 2009. "Welfare implications of the transition to high household debt," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 1-16, January.
    27. MaCurdy, Thomas E., 1982. "The use of time series processes to model the error structure of earnings in a longitudinal data analysis," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 83-114, January.
    28. Robert A. Moffitt & Peter Gottschalk, 2002. "Trends in the Transitory Variance of Earnings in the United States," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 112(478), pages 68-73, March.
    29. Edward L. Glaeser & Joshua D. Gottlieb & Joseph Gyourko, 2012. "Can Cheap Credit Explain the Housing Boom?," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and the Financial Crisis, pages 301-359, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    30. Abowd, John M & Card, David, 1989. "On the Covariance Structure of Earnings and Hours Changes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(2), pages 411-445, March.
    31. repec:fth:pennfi:69 is not listed on IDEAS
    32. David Roodman, 2009. "A Note on the Theme of Too Many Instruments," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 71(1), pages 135-158, February.
    33. Hall, Robert E & Mishkin, Frederic S, 1982. "The Sensitivity of Consumption to Transitory Income: Estimates from Panel Data on Households," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(2), pages 461-481, March.
    34. Richard Blundell & Luigi Pistaferri & Ian Preston, 2008. "Consumption Inequality and Partial Insurance," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1887-1921, December.
    35. Peter Gottschalk & Robert Moffitt, 1994. "The Growth of Earnings Instability in the U.S. Labor Market," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 25(2), pages 217-272.
    36. Jensen & Shore, 2008. "Changes in the Distribution of Income Volatility," 2008 Meeting Papers 82, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    37. Tullio Jappelli, 1990. "Who is Credit Constrained in the U. S. Economy?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 105(1), pages 219-234.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Ortigueira, Salvador & Siassi, Nawid, 2013. "How important is intra-household risk sharing for savings and labor supply?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 60(6), pages 650-666.
    2. Olga Gorbachev, 2011. "Did Household Consumption Become More Volatile?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2248-2270, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Keshav Dogra & Olga Gorbachev, 2016. "Consumption Volatility, Liquidity Constraints and Household Welfare," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 126(597), pages 2012-2037, November.
    2. Olga Gorbachev, 2011. "Did Household Consumption Become More Volatile?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2248-2270, August.
    3. Robert Moffitt & Sisi Zhang, 2018. "Income Volatility and the PSID: Past Research and New Results," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 108, pages 277-280, May.
    4. Meghir, Costas & Pistaferri, Luigi, 2011. "Earnings, Consumption and Life Cycle Choices," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 9, pages 773-854, Elsevier.
    5. Robert Moffitt & Peter Gottschalk, 2008. "Trends in the Transitory Variance of Male Earnings in the U.S., 1970-2004," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 697, Boston College Department of Economics.
    6. Sisi Zhang, 2010. "Recent Trends in Household Income Dynamics for the United States, Germany and Great Britain," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 30(2), pages 1154-1172.
    7. Robert Moffitt & Sisi Zhang, 2018. "The PSID and Income Volatility: Its Record of Seminal Research and Some New Findings," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 680(1), pages 48-81, November.
    8. L. Hospido, 2012. "Modelling heterogeneity and dynamics in the volatility of individual wages," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(3), pages 386-414, April.
    9. Kai Liu, 2010. "Wage Risk, On-the-job Search and Partial Insurance," 2010 Meeting Papers 1136, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    10. Otto Kässi, 2014. "Earnings dynamics of men and women in Finland: permanent inequality versus earnings instability," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 46(2), pages 451-477, March.
    11. Orazio P. Attanasio & Guglielmo Weber, 2010. "Consumption and Saving: Models of Intertemporal Allocation and Their Implications for Public Policy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(3), pages 693-751, September.
    12. Lance Lochner & Youngki Shin, 2014. "Understanding Earnings Dynamics: Identifying and Estimating the Changing Roles of Unobserved Ability, Permanent and Transitory Shocks," NBER Working Papers 20068, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Richard Blundell & Hamish Low & Ian Preston, 2013. "Decomposing changes in income risk using consumption data," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 4(1), pages 1-37, March.
    14. Cappellari, Lorenzo & Jenkins, Stephen P., 2014. "Earnings and labour market volatility in Britain, with a transatlantic comparison," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 201-211.
    15. Shin, Donggyun & Solon, Gary, 2011. "Trends in men's earnings volatility: What does the Panel Study of Income Dynamics show?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(7-8), pages 973-982, August.
    16. Ludwig, Johannes, 2015. "The role of education and household composition for transitory and permanent income inequality–evidence from PSID data," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 129-146.
    17. Robert Moffitt & John Abowd & Christopher Bollinger & Michael Carr & Charles Hokayem & Kevin McKinney & Emily Wiemers & Sisi Zhang & James Ziliak, 2022. "Reconciling Trends in U.S. Male Earnings Volatility: Results from Survey and Administrative Data," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(1), pages 1-11, December.
    18. Kyong Hyun Koo, 2016. "The Evolution of Earnings Volatility During and After the Great Recession," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(4), pages 705-732, October.
    19. Stephen Jenkins & Peter Lambert, 2011. "Robert Moffitt and Peter Gottschalk’s 1995 paper ‘Trends in the covariance structure of earnings in the US: 1969–1987’," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(3), pages 433-437, September.
    20. Stephen Shore, 2015. "The co-movement of couples’ incomes," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 13(3), pages 569-588, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • G29 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Other
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs

    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:edn:esedps:193. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Research Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deediuk.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.