In this paper we revisit two well-known facts regarding lifecycle expenditures. The first is the familiar "hump" shaped … lifecycle profile of nondurable expenditures. We document that the behavior of total nondurables masks surprising heterogeneity … in the lifecycle profile of individual sub-components. We find, for example, that while food expenditures decline after …

Standard tests of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) using data on nondurables typically equate expenditures with … decline in expenditures at the time of retirement is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent on home production. The … innovation of our paper is that we empirically disentangle changes in actual consumption from changes in expenditures. To do so …