IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jmacro/v32y2010i1p169-184.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Idiosyncratic labour income risk and aggregate consumption: An unobserved component approach

Author

Listed:
  • Pozzi, Lorenzo

Abstract

We investigate the importance of aggregate and consumer-specific or idiosyncratic labour income risk for aggregate consumption changes in the US over the period 1952-2001. Theoretically, the effect of labour income risk on consumption changes is decomposed into an aggregate and into an idiosyncratic part. Empirically, aggregate risk is modelled through a GARCH process on aggregate labour income shocks and individual risk is modelled as an unobserved component and obtained through Kalman filtering. Our results suggest that aggregate labour income risk explains a negligible fraction of the variance of aggregate consumption changes. A more important part of aggregate consumption changes is explained by the unobserved component. The interpretation of this component as reflecting idiosyncratic labour income risk is supported by the finding that it is negatively affected by received consumer transfers. Idiosyncratic labour income risk thus matters for the aggregate economy.

Suggested Citation

  • Pozzi, Lorenzo, 2010. "Idiosyncratic labour income risk and aggregate consumption: An unobserved component approach," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 169-184, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jmacro:v:32:y:2010:i:1:p:169-184
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164-0704(09)00093-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

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

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hall, Robert E, 1978. "Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis: Theory and Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(6), pages 971-987, December.
    2. Hubbard, R Glenn & Skinner, Jonathan & Zeldes, Stephen P, 1995. "Precautionary Saving and Social Insurance," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(2), pages 360-399, April.
    3. Hall, Robert E, 1988. "Intertemporal Substitution in Consumption," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 96(2), pages 339-357, April.
    4. Martin Lettau & Sydney Ludvigson, 2001. "Consumption, Aggregate Wealth, and Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(3), pages 815-849, June.
    5. Harvey, Andrew & Ruiz, Esther & Sentana, Enrique, 1992. "Unobserved component time series models with Arch disturbances," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 52(1-2), pages 129-157.
    6. Giorgio Primiceri & Thijs van Rens, 2002. "Inequality over the Business Cycle: Estimating Income Risk using Micro-Data on Consumption," Macroeconomics 0212003, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Engen, Eric M. & Gruber, Jonathan, 2001. "Unemployment insurance and precautionary saving," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(3), pages 545-579, June.
    8. Costas Meghir & Luigi Pistaferri, 2004. "Income Variance Dynamics and Heterogeneity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(1), pages 1-32, January.
    9. David Demery & Nigel W. Duck, 2000. "Incomplete information and the time series behaviour of consumption," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 15(4), pages 355-366.
    10. Jonathan A. Parker & Bruce Preston, 2005. "Precautionary Saving and Consumption Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1119-1143, September.
    11. Sydney Ludvigson, 1999. "Consumption And Credit: A Model Of Time-Varying Liquidity Constraints," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 81(3), pages 434-447, August.
    12. Sydney C. Ludvigson & Alexander Michaelides, 2001. "Does Buffer-Stock Saving Explain the Smoothness and Excess Sensitivity of Consumption?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(3), pages 631-647, June.
    13. Bacchetta, Philippe & Gerlach, Stefan, 1997. "Consumption and credit constraints: International evidence," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 207-238, October.
    14. Marjorie Flavin, 1985. "Excess Sensitivity of Consumption to Current Income: Liquidity Constraints or Myopia?," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 18(1), pages 117-136, February.
    15. Durbin, James & Koopman, Siem Jan, 2012. "Time Series Analysis by State Space Methods," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, edition 2, number 9780199641178.
    16. Caballero, Ricardo J., 1990. "Consumption puzzles and precautionary savings," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 113-136, January.
    17. Gert Peersman & Lorenzo Pozzi, 2008. "Business Cycle Fluctuations and Excess Sensitivity of Private Consumption," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 75(299), pages 514-523, August.
    18. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas & Jonathan A. Parker, 2001. "The Empirical Importance of Precautionary Saving," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(2), pages 406-412, May.
    19. Joon-Ho Hahm & Douglas G. Steigerwald, 1999. "Consumption Adjustment under Time-Varying Income Uncertainty," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 81(1), pages 32-40, February.
    20. 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(2), pages 61-156.
    21. Campbell, John Y & Mankiw, N Gregory, 1990. "Permanent Income, Current Income, and Consumption," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 8(3), pages 265-279, July.
    22. James Banks & Richard Blundell & Agar Brugiavini, 2001. "Risk Pooling, Precautionary Saving and Consumption Growth," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 68(4), pages 757-779.
    23. Kjetil Storesletten & Chris I. Telmer & Amir Yaron, 2004. "Cyclical Dynamics in Idiosyncratic Labor Market Risk," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 112(3), pages 695-717, June.
    24. Deaton, Angus, 1992. "Understanding Consumption," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198288244.
    25. Chang-Jin Kim & Charles R. Nelson, 1999. "State-Space Models with Regime Switching: Classical and Gibbs-Sampling Approaches with Applications," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262112388, April.
    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. Lorenzo Pozzi, 2007. "Idiosyncratic Labour Income Risk and Aggregate Consumption: an Unobserved Component Approach," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 07-069/2, Tinbergen Institute.
    2. L. Pozzi, 2005. "Income uncertainty and aggregate consumption," Working Paper Research 77, National Bank of Belgium.
    3. Lorenzo Pozzi, 2011. "The Time-Varying Volatility of Earnings and Aggregate Precautionary Savings," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 11-144/2, Tinbergen Institute.
    4. Gert Peersman & Lorenzo Pozzi, 2008. "Business Cycle Fluctuations and Excess Sensitivity of Private Consumption," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 75(299), pages 514-523, August.
    5. Tomas Havranek & Anna Sokolova, 2016. "Do Consumers Really Follow a Rule of Thumb? Three Thousand Estimates from 130 Studies Say "Probably Not"," Working Papers 2016/08, Czech National Bank.
    6. Lorenzo Pozzi, 2015. "The Time‐Varying Volatility of Earnings and Aggregate Consumption Growth," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(4), pages 551-580, June.
    7. Tino Berger & Lorenzo Pozzi, 2023. "Cyclical consumption," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 23-064/VI, Tinbergen Institute.
    8. Gerdie Everaert & Lorenzo Pozzi & Ruben Schoonackers, 2017. "On the Stability of the Excess Sensitivity of Aggregate Consumption Growth in the USA," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(4), pages 819-840, June.
    9. Fulford, Scott L., 2015. "The surprisingly low importance of income uncertainty for precaution," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 151-171.
    10. Yulei Luo, 2008. "Consumption Dynamics under Information Processing Constraints," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 11(2), pages 366-385, April.
    11. Julian Thimme, 2017. "Intertemporal Substitution In Consumption: A Literature Review," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 226-257, February.
    12. 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.
    13. Primiceri, Giorgio E. & van Rens, Thijs, 2009. "Heterogeneous life-cycle profiles, income risk and consumption inequality," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(1), pages 20-39, January.
    14. 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.
    15. Douglas W. Elmendorf, "undated". "The Effect of Interest-Rate Changes on Household Saving and Consumption: A Survey," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1996-27, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 10 Dec 2019.
    16. Lugilde, Alba & Bande, Roberto & Riveiro, Dolores, 2017. "Precautionary Saving: a review of the theory and the evidence," MPRA Paper 77511, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    17. Malgarini, Marco & Margani, Patrizia, 2005. "Psychology, consumer sentiment and household expenditures: a disaggregated analysis," MPRA Paper 42443, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    18. Keunbae Ahn, 2021. "Predictable Fluctuations in the Cross-Section and Time-Series of Asset Prices," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 1-2021, January-A.
    19. Orazio P. Attanasio, 1998. "Consumption Demand," NBER Working Papers 6466, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Daria Pignalosa, 2021. "The Euler Equation Approach: Critical Implications of Recent Developments in the Theory of Intertemporal Choice," Bulletin of Political Economy, Bulletin of Political Economy, vol. 15(1), pages 1-43, June.

    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:eee:jmacro:v:32:y:2010:i:1:p:169-184. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/622617 .

    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.