IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cre/crefwp/3.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Precautionary Saving: An Explanation for Excess Sensitivity of Consumption

Author

Abstract

The permanent income hypothesis under certainty equivalence yields a martingale consumption process. Empirically, this hypothesis is rejected because consumption is excessively sensitive to anticipated income. One approach to account for excess sensitivity is to relax certainty equivalence by using utility functions which induce precautionary saving. This paper analyzes a hyperbolic absolute risk avesion utility function. Empirically, some reasonable parametrizations of this specification allow one to match the excess sensitivity associated with the data. Also, these parametrizations permit one to account for the excess smoothness problem. However, it is shown that excess sensitivity and excess smoothness do not reflect the same phenomenon. L'hypothèse de revenu permanent en équivalence certaine implique que la consommation est une martingale. Empiriquement, cette hypothèse est rejetée parce que la consommation est excessivement sensible au revenu anticipé. Une stratégie visant à expliquer la sensibilité excessive consiste à relâcher la propriété d'équivalence certaine afin de considérer l'épargne de précaution. Ce papier analyse l'épargne de précaution découlant d'une fonction d'utilité dont l'aversion absolue au risque est hyperbolique. Empiriquement, certaines spécifications de cette fonction permettent de répliquer la sensibilité excessive observée. Aussi, ces spécifications expliquent le lissage excessif. Toutefois, la sensibilité excessive et le lissage excessif ne reflètent pas le même phénomène.

Suggested Citation

  • Michel Normandin, 1992. "Precautionary Saving: An Explanation for Excess Sensitivity of Consumption," Cahiers de recherche CREFE / CREFE Working Papers 3, CREFE, Université du Québec à Montréal.
    • Handle: RePEc:cre:crefwp:3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Letendre, Marc-Andre & Smith, Gregor W., 2001. "Precautionary saving and portfolio allocation: DP by GMM," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 197-215, August.
    2. Christopher D. Carroll & Karen E. Dynan & Spencer D. Krane, 2003. "Unemployment Risk and Precautionary Wealth: Evidence from Households' Balance Sheets," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 85(3), pages 586-604, August.
    3. Siegmann, Arjen, 2002. "Optimal saving rules for loss-averse agents under uncertainty," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 27-34, September.
    4. Normandin, Michel, 1993. "Épargne de précaution et revenu de travail incertain : un survol de la littérature," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 69(4), pages 347-364, décembre.
    5. James C. Morley, 2007. "The Slow Adjustment of Aggregate Consumption to Permanent Income," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(2-3), pages 615-638, March.
    6. Lage, Maureen J., 1997. "The permanent income hypothesis under permanent-transitory confusion," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 77-90, February.
    7. Sule Alan, 2004. "Precautionary Wealth and Portfolio Allocation: Evidence from Canadian Microdata," Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers 117, McMaster University.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    martingale hypothesis; excess sensitivity; precautionary savings; exact tests.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth

    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:cre:crefwp:3. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Stéphane Pallage (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/crefeca.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.