Does the choice of consumption measure matter? An application to the permanent-income hypothesis

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ziliak, JP
• 署名单位: University of Oregon
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF MONETARY ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0304-3932
• DOI: 10.1016/S0304-3932(97)00062-7
• 发表日期: 1998
• 页码: 201-216
• 关键词: consumption; permanent-income hypothesis; liquidity constraints

摘要

Food consumption in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics is used as a proxy for total consumption in many applications in economics, including tests of the permanent-income hypothesis, tests of separability between consumption and leisure, and tests of intergenerational altruism. Food, however, explains only a small fraction of the variation in total consumption. I propose a measure of composite consumption based on predicted wealth and compare it both to food consumption and to Skinner's (1987) measure of predicted consumption in a test of the permanent-income hypothesis. Using a log-linear intertemporal consumption function I find that food does not reject the permanent-income hypothesis but both Skinner's predicted consumption and the composite measure proposed here do reject the hypothesis. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.