Theories of household saving posit that households add to or draw down wealth to equalize the discounted presented value of consumption over time. This paper examines the extent to which nineteenth-century urban American industrial workers used saving and dissaving to smooth consumption in...

The permanent income hypothesis implies that people save because they rationally expect their labor income to decline; they save "for a rainy day". It follows that saving should be at least as good a predictor of declines in labor income as any other forecast that can be constructed from publicly...

The global shift towards defined-contribution pension schemes has been accompanied by asymmetric risks and new responsibilities for households to plan and fund effectively their own retirement over the years. In this study, expressing and combining preferences for consumption, investment,...

This paper argues that the modern stochastic consumption model, in which impatient consumers face uninsurable labor income risk, matches Milton Friedman's (1957) original description of the Permanent Income Hypothesis much better than the perfect foresight or certainty equivalent models did. The...

This paper uses a two-good version of Hall's (1978) representative agent, permanent income model to derive a structural import demand equation for nondurable consumer goods. Under the identification restriction that taste shocks are stationary, the model is shown to imply that log imports, log...

This paper examines the effect of liquidity constraints on consumption expenditures using a single-time cross-section data set. A reduced-form equation for consumption is estimated on high-saving households by the Tobit procedure to account for the selectivity bias. Since high-saving households...

This paper argues that the typical household's saving is better described by a "bufferstock" version than by the traditional version of the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis (LC/PIH) model. Buffer-stock behavior emerges if consumers with important income uncertainty are sufficiently...

This paper studies a continuous-time optimal consumption and portfolio selection problem when an economic agent with recursive utility has stochastic income and liquidity constraints. To tackle this problem, we introduce a transform of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation into a free boundary...

I study the effects of borrowing and liquidity constraints on the response of consumption toanticipated income changes. Using the PSID over 1999–2013, I find that the well-documentedstrong excess sensitivity of consumption to income of highly constrained households can beexplained by episodes...

The marginal propensity to consume out of wealth is important for evaluating the effects of taxation on consumption, assessing the possibility of multiple equilibria due to aggregate demand spillovers, and explaining observed variations in consumption. It is also a component of the interest...