IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jeurec/v9y2011i1p87-105.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is The Elasticity Of Intertemporal Substitution Constant?

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas F. Crossley
  • Hamish W. Low

Abstract

This paper shows that a power utility specification of preferences over total expenditure (ie. CRRA preferences) implies that intratemporal demands are in the PIGL/PIGLOG class. This class generates (at most) rank two demand systems and we can test the validity of power utility on cross-section data. Further, if we maintain the assumption of power utility, and within period preferences are not homothetic, then the intertemporal preference parameter is identified by the curvature of Engel curves. Under the power utility assumption, neither Euler equation estimation nor structural consumption function estimation is necessary to identify the power parameter. In our empirical work, we use demand data to estimate the power utility parameter and to test the assumption of the power utility representation. We find estimates of the power parameter larger than obtained from Euler equation estimation, but we reject the power specification of within period utility.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas F. Crossley & Hamish W. Low, 2011. "Is The Elasticity Of Intertemporal Substitution Constant?," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 87-105, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jeurec:v:9:y:2011:i:1:p:87-105
    DOI: j.1542-4774.2010.01001.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2010.01001.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/j.1542-4774.2010.01001.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lwebel Arthur & Perraudin William, 1995. "A Theorem on Portfolio Separation with General Preferences," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 65(2), pages 624-626, April.
    2. Richard Blundell & Martin Browning & Costas Meghir, 1994. "Consumer Demand and the Life-Cycle Allocation of Household Expenditures," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 61(1), pages 57-80.
    3. Ait-Sahalia, Yacine & Lo, Andrew W., 2000. "Nonparametric risk management and implied risk aversion," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1-2), pages 9-51.
    4. Attanasio, Orazio P & Weber, Guglielmo, 1995. "Is Consumption Growth Consistent with Intertemporal Optimization? Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(6), pages 1121-1157, December.
    5. Sydney Ludvigson & Christina H. Paxson, 2001. "Approximation Bias In Linearized Euler Equations," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 83(2), pages 242-256, May.
    6. Sule Alan & Martin Browning, 2003. "Estimating Intertemporal Allocation Parameters using Simulated Residual Estimation," CAM Working Papers 2003-03, University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. Centre for Applied Microeconometrics.
    7. Attanasio, Orazio P & Browning, Martin, 1995. "Consumption over the Life Cycle and over the Business Cycle," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 85(5), pages 1118-1137, December.
    8. Lewbel, Arthur, 1996. "Demand Estimation with Expenditure Measurement Errors on the Left and Right Hand Side," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 78(4), pages 718-725, November.
    9. Orazio P. Attanasio & Hamish Low, 2004. "Estimating Euler Equations," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 7(2), pages 405-435, April.
    10. Muellbauer, John, 1976. "Community Preferences and the Representative Consumer," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(5), pages 979-999, September.
    11. Atkeson, Andrew & Ogaki, Masao, 1996. "Wealth-varying intertemporal elasticities of substitution: Evidence from panel and aggregate data," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 507-534, December.
    12. Arthur Lewbel, 2003. "A rational rank four demand system," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 18(2), pages 127-135.
    13. Pollak, Robert A & Wales, Terence J, 1979. "Welfare Comparisons and Equivalence Scales," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(2), pages 216-221, May.
    14. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Arthur Lewbel, 1997. "Quadratic Engel Curves And Consumer Demand," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 79(4), pages 527-539, November.
    15. MacKinnon, James G, 1992. "Model Specification Tests and Artificial Regressions," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 30(1), pages 102-146, March.
    16. Robert A. Pollak, 1971. "Additive Utility Functions and Linear Engel Curves," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 38(4), pages 401-414.
    17. Lewbel, Arthur, 1991. "The Rank of Demand Systems: Theory and Nonparametric Estimation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(3), pages 711-730, May.
    18. L. Eeckhoudt & C. Gollier & H. Schlesinger, 2005. "Economic and financial decisions under risk," Post-Print hal-00325882, HAL.
    19. Martin Browning & Thomas F. Crossley, 2000. "Luxuries Are Easier to Postpone: A Proof," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 108(5), pages 1022-1026, October.
    20. John Muellbauer, 1975. "Aggregation, Income Distribution and Consumer Demand," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 42(4), pages 525-543.
    21. Deaton, Angus S & Muellbauer, John, 1980. "An Almost Ideal Demand System," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 70(3), pages 312-326, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Thomas F. Crossley & Hamish W. Low, 2005. "Unexploited Connections Between Intra- and Inter-temporal Allocation," Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers 131, McMaster University.
    2. LaFrance, Jeffrey T., 2008. "The structure of US food demand," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 147(2), pages 336-349, December.
    3. Jesus Fernández-Villaverde & Dirk Krueger, 2007. "Consumption over the Life Cycle: Facts from Consumer Expenditure Survey Data," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 89(3), pages 552-565, August.
    4. Barnett, William A. & Serletis, Apostolos, 2008. "Consumer preferences and demand systems," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 147(2), pages 210-224, December.
    5. Simon Alder & Timo Boppart & Andreas Müller, 2022. "A Theory of Structural Change That Can Fit the Data," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 14(2), pages 160-206, April.
    6. Rishab Guha & Serena Ng, 2019. "A Machine Learning Analysis of Seasonal and Cyclical Sales in Weekly Scanner Data," NBER Chapters, in: Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics, pages 403-436, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Veeramani, Venkat N. & Maynard, Leigh J., 2004. "Testing For The Existence Of Price Points In Retail Milk Scanner Data Using Microeconomic Theory," 2004 Annual meeting, August 1-4, Denver, CO 20378, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    8. Barnett, William A. & Serletis, Apostolos, 2008. "Measuring Consumer Preferences and Estimating Demand Systems," MPRA Paper 12318, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Havranek, Tomas & Horvath, Roman & Irsova, Zuzana & Rusnak, Marek, 2015. "Cross-country heterogeneity in intertemporal substitution," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(1), pages 100-118.
    10. Daria Pignalosa, 2019. "On the role of the utility function in the estimation of preference parameters," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 70(4), pages 793-820, November.
    11. Engelhardt, Gary V. & Kumar, Anil, 2009. "The elasticity of intertemporal substitution: New evidence from 401(k) participation," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 103(1), pages 15-17, April.
    12. Jeffrey LaFrance & Rulon Pope, 2008. "The Generalized Quadratic Expenditure System," Working Papers 2008-27, School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University.
    13. H. Youn Kim & Keith R. McLaren & K. K. Gary Wong, 2020. "Valuation of public goods: an intertemporal mixed demand approach," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 59(5), pages 2223-2253, November.
    14. Toshinobu Matsuda, 2006. "A trigonometric flexible consumer demand system," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 39(1), pages 145-162, February.
    15. Thomas H. Jørgensen, 2016. "Euler equation estimation: Children and credit constraints," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 7(3), pages 935-968, November.
    16. William Barnett & Ousmane Seck, 2006. "Rotterdam vs Almost Ideal Models: Will the Best Demand Specification Please Stand Up?," WORKING PAPERS SERIES IN THEORETICAL AND APPLIED ECONOMICS 200605, University of Kansas, Department of Economics.
    17. Cash, Sean B. & Goddard, Ellen W., 2006. "New Directions in Consumer Behaviour Research," CAFRI: Current Agriculture, Food and Resource Issues, Canadian Agricultural Economics Society, issue 7, pages 1-10, August.
    18. Donald, Stephen G. & Fortuna, Natércia & Pipiras, Vladas, 2011. "Local and Global Rank Tests for Multivariate Varying-Coefficient Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 29(2), pages 295-306.
    19. Julian Thimme, 2017. "Intertemporal Substitution In Consumption: A Literature Review," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 226-257, February.
    20. Orazio P. Attanasio & Guglielmo Weber, 2010. "Consumption and Saving: Models of Intertemporal Allocation and Their Implications for Public Policy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(3), pages 693-751, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jeurec:v:9:y:2011:i:1:p:87-105. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eeaaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.