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Precautionary Saving and the Marginal Propensity to Consume out of Permanent Income

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Christopher D. Carroll

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Abstract

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers are impatient and are subject to transitory as well as permanent shocks, the optimal marginal propensity to consume out of permanent shocks (the MPCP) is strictly less than 1, because buffer stock savers have a target wealth-to-permanent-income ratio; a positive shock to permanent income moves the ratio below its target, temporarily boosting saving.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 8233.

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Date of creation: Apr 2001
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8233

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
D91 - Microeconomics - - Intertemporal Choice and Growth - - - Intertemporal Consumer Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving

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  1. Carroll, Christopher D & Kimball, Miles S, 1996. "On the Concavity of the Consumption Function," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(4), pages 981-92, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  2. Caballero, Ricardo J., 1990. "Consumption puzzles and precautionary savings," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 113-136, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  3. Christopher D. Carroll, 2001. "A Theory of the Consumption Function, with and without Liquidity Constraints," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(3), pages 23-45, Summer. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. MaCurdy, Thomas E., 1982. "The use of time series processes to model the error structure of earnings in a longitudinal data analysis," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 83-114, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Christopher D. Carroll, 1992. "The Buffer-Stock Theory of Saving: Some Macroeconomic Evidence," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 23(1992-2), pages 61-156. [Downloadable!]
  6. Abowd, John M & Card, David, 1989. "On the Covariance Structure of Earnings and Hours Changes," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(2), pages 411-45, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  7. Deaton, Angus, 1991. "Saving and Liquidity Constraints," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(5), pages 1221-48, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  8. David S. Johnson & Jonathan A. Parker & Nicholas S. Souleles, 2006. "Household Expenditure and the Income Tax Rebates of 2001," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1589-1610, December. [Downloadable!]
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  9. Storesletten, Kjetil & Telmer, Christopher I. & Yaron, Amir, 2004. "Consumption and risk sharing over the life cycle," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(3), pages 609-633, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Miles S. Kimball, 1990. "Precautionary Saving and the Marginal Propensity to Consume," NBER Working Papers 3403, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  11. Carroll, Christopher D. & Samwick, Andrew A., 1997. "The nature of precautionary wealth," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(1), pages 41-71, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  12. Tullio Jappelli & Luigi Pistaferri, 2000. "Intertemporal Choice and Consumption Mobility," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 0118, Econometric Society. [Downloadable!]
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Tullio Jappelli & Luigi Pistaferri, 2005. "Intertemporal Choice and Consumption Mobility," CFS Working Paper Series 2005/28, Center for Financial Studies. [Downloadable!]
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  2. Emilio Fernandez-Corugedo, 2004. "Consumption Theory," Handbooks, Centre for Central Banking Studies, Bank of England, number 23, December. [Downloadable!]
  3. Riccardo Corradini, 2005. "An Empirical Analysis of Permanent Income Hypothesis Applied to Italy using State Space Models with non zero correlation between trend and cycle," Econometrics 0509009, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]
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  4. Jim Malley & Hassan Molana, 2002. "The Life-Cycle-Permanent-Income Model: A Reinterpretation and Supporting Evidence," Working Papers 2002_17, Department of Economics, University of Glasgow. [Downloadable!]
  5. José María Casado García, 2008. "From Income to Consumption: Measuring Households Partial Insurance," Working Papers 2008-09, FEDEA. [Downloadable!]
  6. Yulei Luo, 2005. "Consumption Dynamics under Information Processing Constraints," Macroeconomics 0505011, EconWPA, revised 03 Jun 2005. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
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