Habits, Sentiment and Predictable Income in the Dynamics of Aggregate Consumption

This paper explores whether habit formation in the representative agent’s preferences can explain two failures of the standard permanent income model: the sensitivity to lagged consumer sentiment, and to predictable changes in income. I show that in a habit formation model, the sensitivity of consumption to predicted income can be largely reinterpreted as a sluggish response to news. Moreover, the sensitivity of consumption to sentiment reflects the serial correlation in consumption growth generated by habits. The estimated model predicts an immediate (first-quarter) MPC out of a permanent tax cut of only about 30%.