IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nsr/niesrd/38.html

Why have consumption functions broken down?

Author

Listed:
  • A P Blake
  • P F Westaway

Abstract

Most forecasters in the UK failed to foresee the changes in consumer spending in the boom of the late‐1980s and subsequently during the downturn of the early‐1990s. With hindsight two possible explanations can be given: financial liberalisation allowed consumers to spend more, and ultimately to overspend; alternatively consumers over‐estimated their income expectations during the 1980s, and subsequently revised them down very sharply. This paper attempts to distinguish between these explanations by estimating a consumption function which is explicitly &dquo;forward‐looking&dquo;. It finds evidence of instability both in the process of generating income expectations and also in the behaviour of consumers conditional on those expectations. Contact NIESR if copy required

Suggested Citation

  • A P Blake & P F Westaway, 1993. "Why have consumption functions broken down?," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 38, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:38
    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
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    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:nsr:niesrd:38. 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: Library & Information Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/niesruk.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.