Does Consumption Respond to Transitory Shocks? Reconciling Natural Experiments and Semistructural Methods†

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Commault, Jeanne
• 署名单位: Institut d'Etudes Politiques Paris (Sciences Po)
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MACROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7707
• DOI: 10.1257/mac.20190296
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 96-122
• 关键词: household consumption; income; Heterogeneity; INEQUALITY; DYNAMICS

摘要

Studies based on natural experiments find that consumption responds strongly and significantly to a transitory variation in income, while semistructural estimations find no pass-through of transitory shocks to consumption. I develop a more robust semistructural estimator that relaxes the assumption that log consumption is a random walk. The robust pass-through estimate is significant and large, implying a yearly marginal propensity to consume of 0.32, close to the natural experiment findings. The robust estimator performs well in numerical simulations of a life cycle model, while nonrobust estimators do not. The difference between the two in the simulations is similar to their difference in the survey data. (JEL D15, E21, J11)