Download Free The Excess Smoothness Puzzle In Consumption Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Excess Smoothness Puzzle In Consumption and write the review.

The paper investigates the implications of the omitted information problem -- that is, the econometric problem which arises because an econometrician cannot explicitly include the complete set of variables potentially used by agents -- in the context of the "excess smoothness" phenomenon posed by Deaton 11987]. The paper shows that an econometrician who fails to take into account the effects of omitted information will incorrectly conclude that an empirical finding of excess smoothness of consumption implies that the income process is nonstationary. By contrast, with a more thorough understanding of the omitted information problem, the finding of excess smoothness of consumption is easily explained with two assumptions: a) the consumption data is generated by the excess sensitivity alternative hypothesis, in which consumption is a weighted average of current income and permanent income, and b) agents are forecasting on the basis of a larger information set than the econometrician. Further, excess smoothness is revealed to be consistent with a wide range of stationary income processes as well as nonstationary income processes. Thus the common presumption that the excess smoothness phenomenon is linked in an essential way to the stationarity or nonstationarity of the income process evaporates when omitted information is taken into consideration
This book provides an overview of the recent research on saving and consumption, a field in which substantial progress has been made over the last decade. Attempts by economists to understand saving and consumption patterns have generated some of the best science in economics. For more than fifty years, there has been serious empirical and theoretical activity, and data, theory, and policy have never been separated as has happened in many branches of economics. Research has drawn microeconomists interested in household behaviour, as well as macroeconomists, for whom the behaviour of aggregate consumption has always occupied a central role in explaining aggregate fluctuations. Econometricians have also made distinguished contributions, and there has been a steady flow of new methodologies by those working on saving and consumption, in time-series econometrics, as well as in the study of micro and panel data. A coherent account of these developments is presented here, emphasizing the interplay between micro and the macro, between studies of cross-section and panels, and those using aggregate time series data.
This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain inattentive. This behavior implies that news disperses slowly throughout the population, so events have a gradual and delayed effect on aggregate consumption. The model predicts that aggregate consumption adjusts slowly to shocks, and is able to explain the excess sensitivity and excess smoothness puzzles. In addition, individual consumption is sensitive to ordinary and unexpected past news, but it is not sensitive to extraordinary or predictable events. The model further predicts that some people rationally choose to not plan, live hand-to-mouth, and save less, while other people sporadically update their plans. The longer are these plans, the more they save. Evidence using U.S. aggregate and microeconomic data generally supports these predictions.
The buffer-stock model of precautionary saving has become a workhorse of modern-day consumer theory. Despite its growing popularity, virtually no research has set out to formally investigate whether buffer-stock behavior can replicate the well-known smoothness of aggregate consumption growth ("excess smoothness"), or its correlation with lagged income ("excess sensitivity"). We investigate an aggregate version of the standard buffer stock model and examine how its predictions vary according to whether individuals observe economy-wide variation in their income. Our results show that, when individuals observe each component of their income, aggregate buffer stock consumption growth is at least as volatile as aggregate income growth and insignificantly correlated with lagged income growth. We show that adding incomplete information about aggregate income goes part of the way toward resolving these discrepancies, but still falls short of matching the data in magnitude. In particular, buffer stock saving creates a smoothness puzzle for aggregate consumption that remains to be explained.