Financial wealth effects and consumption expenditure

There has been a renewed interest in the wealth effects on household consumption expenditure mostly in the background of the global financial crisis and Eurozone turmoil. The available literature on wealth effects mostly focuses on advanced economies. Hence, this article studies the financial wealth effects on private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) in an emerging economy like India. We use the quarterly data for the period 1951–2015 and employ the ARDL method that has the flexibility in overcoming the econometric issues associated with the traditional methods in the analysis of time series models. The results suggest that financial assets wealth in the form of stock market capitalization (MC) significantly affects the PFCE. This article establishes the long‐run positive relationship between financial wealth assets and household consumption. The major inference is that households are closely linked with the financial markets through their investments in the form of insurance, mutual funds, company deposits, company stocks, and other forms. Hence their consumption behavior is significantly affected by the financial wealth created by the financial markets. The policy implication is to make the financial markets more transparent, easy to access by reducing the related financial intermediation costs leading to a deeper integration of the households with the financial markets, which in turn would result in increased financial asset wealth generation and consequently increased household consumption to boost economic growth.