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Impact of Occupational Unemployment Risk on Household Spending

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  • Christopher D. Cotton
  • Vaishali Garga
  • Justin Rohan

Abstract

The life-cycle consumption and permanent income hypotheses predict that if workers face greater likelihood of unemployment in the future that lowers expected future income, they will save more today. In this paper, we test this hypothesis by looking at the expenditure response of workers to the change in unemployment risk measured at the occupational level. We find that occupational unemployment risk does not have a large impact on consumption expenditure. However, despite investigating multiple forms of occupational unemployment risk for multiple expenditure categories in two expenditure surveys (PSID, CEX), we do not obtain narrow confidence intervals for our estimates, so there remains a possibility of a limited impact.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher D. Cotton & Vaishali Garga & Justin Rohan, 2021. "Impact of Occupational Unemployment Risk on Household Spending," Working Papers 22-7, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedbwp:94277
    DOI: 10.29412/res.wp.2022.07
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    unemployment risk; expenditures; life-cycle consumption; permanent income;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

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