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The Insensitivity of Consumption to News About Income

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Kenneth D. West

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Abstract

This paper uses a variance bounds test to see whether consumption is too sensitive to news about income to be consistent with a standard permanent income model, under the maintained hypothesis that income has a unit root. It is found that, if anything, consumption is less sensitive than the model would predict. This implication is robust to the representative consumer having private information about his future income that the econometrician does not have, to wealth shocks, and to transitory consumption. This suggests the importance in future research on the model of allowing for factors that tend to make consumption smooth.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 2252.

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Date of creation: Sep 1988
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Publication status: published as West, Kenneth D. "The Insensitivity of Consumption to News About Income." Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 21, (1988), pp. 17-33.
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2252

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Newey, Whitney K & West, Kenneth D, 1987. "A Simple, Positive Semi-definite, Heteroskedasticity and Autocorrelation Consistent Covariance Matrix," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(3), pages 703-08, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin S. Eichenbaum, 1986. "Temporal Aggregation and Structural Inference in Macroeconomics," NBER Technical Working Papers 0060, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  3. Hall, Robert E, 1978. "Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(6), pages 971-87, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  4. Gregory Mankiw, N. & Shapiro, Matthew D., 1985. "Trends, random walks, and tests of the permanent income hypothesis," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 165-174, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Hansen, Lars Peter & Sargent, Thomas J., 1980. "Formulating and estimating dynamic linear rational expectations models," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 2(2), pages 7-46, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  6. Watson, Mark W., 1986. "Univariate detrending methods with stochastic trends," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 49-75, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Lars Peter Hansen & Thomas J. Sargent, 1981. "Exact linear rational expectations models: specification and estimation," Staff Report 71, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. [Downloadable!]
  8. Marjorie Flavin, 1985. "Excess Sensitivity of Consumption to Current Income: Liquidity Constraints or Myopia?," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 18(1), pages 117-36, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum & David Marshall, 1987. "The Permanent Income Hypothesis Revisited," NBER Working Papers 2209, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Grossman, Sanford J & Shiller, Robert J, 1981. "The Determinants of the Variability of Stock Market Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(2), pages 222-27, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  11. Bernanke, Ben, 1985. "Adjustment costs, durables, and aggregate consumption," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 15(1), pages 41-68, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  12. Flavin, Marjorie A, 1981. "The Adjustment of Consumption to Changing Expectations about Future Income," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(5), pages 974-1009, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  13. Michener, Ron, 1984. "Permanent income in general equilibrium," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 297-305, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. James M. Nason, 1991. "The permanent income hypothesis when the bliss point is stochastic," Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics 46, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Lawrence J. Christiano, 1987. "Why is consumption less volatile than income?," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, issue Fall, pages 2-20. [Downloadable!]
  3. Charlotte Ostergaard & Bent E. Sorensen & Oved Yosha, 2000. "Consumption and aggregate constraints : evidence from U.S. states and Canadian provinces," Research Working Paper RWP 00-04, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. Orazio Attanasio & Nicola Pavoni, 2007. "Risk Sharing in Private Information Models with Asset Accumulation: Explaining the Excess Smoothness of Consumption," NBER Working Papers 12994, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. David F. Bradford, 1993. "Market Value Vs. Financial Accounting Measures of National Saving," NBER Working Papers 2906, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  6. Petar D. Vujanovic, 1999. "HABITS AND THE SAVINGS-GROWTH RELATIONSHIP Why US Personal Savings Rates Are At Historic Lows," Macroeconomics 9905002, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]
  7. Orazio Attanasio & Margherita Borella, 2006. "Stochastic Components of Individual Consumption: A Time Series Analysis of Grouped Data," NBER Working Papers 12456, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Marjorie A. Flavin, 1988. "The Excess Smoothness of Consumption: Identification and Interpretation," NBER Working Papers 2807, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Lawrence J. Christiano & Martin Eichenbaum, 1989. "Unit Roots in Real GNP: Do We Know, and Do We Care?," NBER Working Papers 3130, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  10. Jim Malley & Hassan Molana, 1997. "The Permanent Income Hypothesis Revisited. Reconciling Evidence from Aggregate Data with the Representative Consumer Behaviour," Working Papers 9708, Department of Economics, University of Glasgow. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  11. Jim Malley & Hassan Molana, 2002. "The Life-Cycle-Permanent-Income Model: A Reinterpretation and Supporting Evidence," Working Papers 2002_17, Department of Economics, University of Glasgow. [Downloadable!]
  12. Abdelhak S. Senhadji, 2000. "How Significant are Departures from Certainty Equivalence? Some Analytical and Empirical Results," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 3(3), pages 597-617, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  13. Andrew B. Abel & Laurence J. Kotlikoff, 1994. "Does the Consumption of Different Age Groups Move Together? A New Nonparametric Test of Intergenerational Altruism," NBER Working Papers 2490, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  14. Jim Malley & Hassan Molana, 2006. "Further Evidence from Aggregate Data on the Life-Cycle-Permanent-Income Model," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 31(4), pages 1025-1041, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  15. Joseph G. Haubrich, 1990. "Consumption and fractional differencing: old and new anomalies," Working Paper 9010, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  16. Laura Serlenga, . "Three Alternative Approaches to Test the Permanent Income Hypothesis in Dynamic Panels," series 0005, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche - Università di Bari. [Downloadable!]
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