IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpma/9503003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Concavity of the Consumption Function

Author

Listed:
  • Christopher D. Carroll

    (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System)

  • Miles S. Kimball

    (The University of Michigan)

Abstract

Zeldes (1989) Carroll (1992; 1993), and others have shown that optimal consumption behavior for consumers facing income uncertainty can be remarkably different from the certainty-equivalent case. Carroll (1992; 1993) observes that many of the differences can be attributed to the concavity of the consumption function under uncertainty, but he does not describe the conditions under which the consumption function will be concave. We show that if labor income is stochastic, the consumption function will be concave for many commonly used utility functions, and if both labor income and capital income are stochastic, the consumption function is concave for an even broader group of utility functions.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher D. Carroll & Miles S. Kimball, 1995. "On the Concavity of the Consumption Function," Macroeconomics 9503003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpma:9503003
    Note: 13 pages, one figure, PostScript file. Need uudecode and a PostScript printer to print.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mac/papers/9503/9503003.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/mac/papers/9503/9503003.ps.gz
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Neave, Edwin H., 1971. "Multiperiod consumption-investment decisions and risk preference," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 3(1), pages 40-53, March.
    2. Stephen P. Zeldes, 1989. "Optimal Consumption with Stochastic Income: Deviations from Certainty Equivalence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 104(2), pages 275-298.
    3. Miles S. Kimball, 1990. "Precautionary Saving and the Marginal Propensity to Consume," NBER Working Papers 3403, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Christopher D. Carroll, 1997. "Buffer-Stock Saving and the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 112(1), pages 1-55.
    5. Christopher D. Carroll, 1992. "The Buffer-Stock Theory of Saving: Some Macroeconomic Evidence," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 23(2), pages 61-156.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

    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:wpa:wuwpma:9503003. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (EconWPA). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    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 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.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.