On the Stability of the Excess Sensitivity of Aggregate Consumption Growth in the USA

This paper investigates whether there is time variation in the excess sensitivity of aggregate consumption growth to anticipated aggregate disposable income growth using quarterly US data over the period 1953–2014. Our empirical framework contains the possibility of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth and takes into account measurement error and time aggregation. Our empirical specification is cast into a Bayesian state‐space model and estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We use a Bayesian model selection approach to deal with the non‐regular test for the null hypothesis of no time variation in the excess sensitivity parameter. Anticipated disposable income growth is calculated by incorporating an instrumental variables estimation approach into our MCMC algorithm. Our results suggest that the excess sensitivity parameter in the USA is stable at around 0.23 over the entire sample period. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Separability and Aggregate Shocks in the Life-cycle Model of Consumption: Evidence from Spain

The purpose of this paper is to test the life-cycle permanent income hypothesis using an unbalanced panel from the Spanish family expenditure survey. Our model accounts for aggregate shocks and non-separability in the Euler equation among consumption goods, contrary to most of the literature in this area. Our results do not indicate excess sensitivity of consumption growth to income.     

A Micro‐Decomposition Analysis of Aggregate Human Development Outcomes*

We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to ‘non‐income’ factors and differences in the model linking outcomes to income and non‐income characteristics. The income effect at the micro level is modelled non‐parametrically, so as to flexibly reflect potentially complex distributional changes. Our proposed method is illustrated using data for Morocco and Vietnam, and the results offer some surprising insights into the observed aggregate gains in schooling attainments.     

Incomplete information and the time series behaviour of consumption

Pischke ( 1995 ) uses both microeconomic and macroeconomic US data to test the idea that, within an otherwise standard PIH framework, ignorance by agents of aggregate labour income can account for the observed degree of excess smoothness and sensitivity in consumption. His tests involve only the second moments of aggregate consumption and labour income. In this paper our main aim is to identify and test the restrictions his model implies for aggregate consumption dynamics, using US quarterly data over the period 1959–1996, but our framework allows us also to test an earlier, related model of Goodfriend ( 1992 ). We find that both models can be formally rejected: ignorance of aggregate labour income cannot by itself account for aggregate consumption dynamics; some other relaxation of the assumptions of the standard PIH is required. We give an example of one possible such relaxation and present evidence indicating that Pischke's version of imperfect information may, within that framework, have a significant role to play. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heterogeneity in risk aversion and risk sharing regressions

Heterogeneity in risk attitudes, if not properly accounted for, may induce a bias on the income coefficient of standard consumption insurance regressions. We show that, extending the theoretical analysis and empirical findings in Schulhofer‐Wohl (Journal of Political Economy, 2011, 119, 925–958), the sign of the bias is ambiguous, and depends on cycle‐related variables and on the covariances of both aggregate and idiosyncratic risk with individual risk aversion.     

Consumption and Aggregate Constraints: International Evidence*

This paper documents that region‐level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged region‐level income in Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and West Germany. However, region‐specific consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged region‐specific income. Moreover, excess sensitivity is inversely related to standard measures of openness and credit market integration and for most countries, it has decreased over time. These findings are consistent with the results reported by Ostergaard et al. [Journal of Political Economy (2002) Vol. 110, pp. 634–645] for US states and Canadian provinces, and provide empirical support for the hypothesis that closed‐economy constraints may partly be responsible for the excess sensitivity phenomenon in aggregate data.     

Testing the Empirical Relevance of the ‘Saving for a Rainy Day’ Hypothesis in US Metro Areas

The joint implication of the consumption Euler equation and cointegration between income and consumption is that savings predict future income declines, the ‘saving for a rainy day’ hypothesis. The empirical relevance of this hypothesis plays a key role in discussions of fiscal policy multipliers, and it holds under the null that the permanent income hypothesis is true. We find little support for this hypothesis using time series data for the 100 largest US Metropolitan Statistical Areas for the period 1980q1–2015q4. Our approach is to test for cointegration and weak exogeneity between income and consumption, and by exploring the direction of Granger causality between the two time series. We find that income more often predicts consumption and saving than the converse. We also give evidence that house price changes played a role in US income and consumption dynamics, before, during and after the Great Recession.     

The relative income hypothesis

Despite its theoretical dominance, the empirical case in favor of the permanent income hypothesis is weak. Contrary to one of its basic implications, a growing body of evidence suggests that rich households save a higher proportion of their permanent income than poor households. We propose an overlapping-generations economy where households care about relative consumption. As a result, an individual's consumption is driven by the comparison of his lifetime income and the lifetime income of his reference group; a permanent income version of Duesenberry's (1949) relative income hypothesis. Across households the savings rate increases with income while aggregate savings are independent of the income distribution.     

AN EMPIRICAL GROWTH MODEL FOR MAJOR OIL EXPORTERS

This paper develops a long‐run output relation for a major oil‐exporting economy where the oil income‐to‐output ratio remains sufficiently high over a prolonged period. It extends the stochastic growth model developed in Binder and Pesaran (1999) by including oil exports as an additional factor in the capital accumulation process. The paper distinguishes between the two cases where the growth of oil income, g^o, is less than the natural growth rate (the sum of the population growth, n, and the growth of technical progress, g), and when g^o ≥ g + n. Under the former, the effects of oil income on the economy's steady growth rate will vanish eventually, while under the latter oil income enters the long‐run output equation with a coefficient which is equal to the share of capital if it is further assumed that the underlying production technology can be represented by a Cobb–Douglas production function. The long‐run theory is tested using quarterly data on nine major oil economies. Overall, the test results support the long‐run theory, with the existence of long‐run relations between real output, foreign output and real oil income established for six of the nine economies considered. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluating consumer sentiments as predictors of UK household consumption behavior: Are they accurate and useful?

This paper investigates empirically whether consumer sentiments indices, based on surveys complied by GfK, forecast household consumption types for the UK. Firstly, we use a quantitative equation approach to assess whether the indices are able to forecast household consumption growth in addition to traditional variables, which are included as control variables. Subsequently, using qualitative directional analysis, we investigate whether the indices are accurate and useful predictors as well. We find that, broadly speaking, both the headline, or aggregate, and the major purchasing indices have some predictive powers in addition to the control variables and are also directionally accurate and useful.     

DID INEQUALITY CAUSE THE U.S. FINANCIAL CRISIS?

In his widely discussed book ‘Fault Lines’ (2010), Raghuram Rajan argues that many low and middle income consumers have reduced their saving and increased debt since income inequality started to soar in the United States in the early 1980s. This has temporarily kept private consumption and employment high, but it also contributed to the creation of a credit bubble. This surge in household indebtedness turned out to be unsustainable in the financial crisis starting in 2007. Although Rajan and others emphasize the role of government in promoting credit to those households with declining relative (permanent) incomes, other strands of the literature have focused more explicitly on the implications of rising inequality for aggregate demand and households’ demand for credit. These differences in emphasis may explain why the literature on the inequality‐crisis nexus appears somewhat disparate, even though the various strands are far from mutually exclusive but rather complement each other. We therefore place the ‘Rajan hypothesis’ in the context of competing theories of consumption, and survey the empirical literature on the effects of inequality on household behaviour. We conclude that the empirical evidence calls for a renaissance of the relative income hypothesis of consumption.     

Real‐time detection of regimes of predictability in the US equity premium

We propose new real‐time monitoring procedures for the emergence of end‐of‐sample predictive regimes using sequential implementations of standard (heteroskedasticity‐robust) regression t‐statistics for predictability applied over relatively short time periods. The procedures we develop can also be used for detecting historical regimes of temporary predictability. Our proposed methods are robust to both the degree of persistence and endogeneity of the regressors in the predictive regression and to certain forms of heteroskedasticity in the shocks. We discuss how the monitoring procedures can be designed such that their false positive rate can be set by the practitioner at the start of the monitoring period using detection rules based on information obtained from the data in a training period. We use these new monitoring procedures to investigate the presence of regime changes in the predictability of the US equity premium at the 1‐month horizon by traditional macroeconomic and financial variables, and by binary technical analysis indicators. Our results suggest that the 1‐month‐ahead equity premium has temporarily been predictable, displaying so‐called “pockets of predictability,” and that these episodes of predictability could have been detected in real time by practitioners using our proposed methodology.     

Disaggregate Wealth and Aggregate Consumption: an Investigation of Empirical Relationships for the G7*

To date, studies of wealth effects on consumption have mainly used aggregate wealth definitions on a single‐country basis. This study seeks to break new ground by analysing disaggregated financial wealth in consumption functions for G7 countries. Contrary to earlier empirical work, we find that illiquid financial wealth (i.e. securities, pensions and mortgage debt) tends to be a more important long‐run determinant of consumption than liquid financial wealth. These results imply potential instability in consumption functions employing aggregate wealth. Our results are robust using SURE; when testing with a nested specification; and when using a linear model.     

Estimating Excess Sensitivity and Habit Persistence in Consumption Using Greenbook Forecasts

In this paper, we revisit the issue of excess sensitivity of consumption to income and address the weak instrument problem that is well documented in this literature. Using quarterly data for the US economy, we first highlight the weak instrument problem by showing that the use of conventional instruments tends to overestimate the share of rule-of-thumb consumers. To address this weak instrument problem, we propose a new instrument for endogenous disposable income growth in the consumption function, namely, the Greenbook forecast of real disposable income growth. We show that this instrument encompasses the information contained in the conventional set of instruments, and is a superior predictor of income growth. We find that using our proposed instrument ameliorates the weak instrument problem and provides a much smaller estimate for the rule-of-thumb consumers. We also extend our empirical framework to allow for habit persistence and provide an estimate for this important parameter of the consumption function. Finally, we use a time-varying specification of consumption function that allows for endogenous regressors, and document a decline in the share of rule-of-thumb consumers and a rise in the habit-persistence parameter in the US over our sample period.     

INCOME PERSISTENCE AND MACRO-POLICY FEEDBACKS IN THE US*

This paper analyses and forecasts annual time series of aggregate real income per head in the US. The approach integrates elements from recent univariate time series analyses with multi-equation macromodels in which policy feedback rules have been endogenized. The main conclusions are as follows. Firstly, aggregate real per capita income is subject to significant trend reversion. This conclusion comes through more clearly by examining the data at an annual rather than the more usual quarterly frequency and by incorporating multivariate economic content in the income process. Secondly, there is significant evidence for the Lucas (1976) or Haavelmo (1944) critique: in the US there appears to have been a shift in the structural macropolicy reaction function causing a corresponding shift in the reduced form income forecasting equation. This is associated with increased concern in the late 1980's over the size of US budget deficits. Thirdly, with the above proviso, useful real income forecasts can be made as far as three years ahead. Finally, the paper provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of monetary policy on real output or income. The change in the short-term interest rate is highly significant in forecasting income growth up to three years after the change.     

Is agglomeration really good for growth? Global efficiency,interregional equity and uneven growth

According to NEG literature, spatial concentration of industrial activities increases growth at the regional and aggregate level without generating regional growth differentials. This view is not supported by the data. We extend the canonical model with an additional sector producing non-tradable goods which benefits from localized knowledge spillovers coming from the R&D performing industrial sector. This view, motivated by the evidence, generates both an anti-growth and a pro-growth effect of agglomeration for both the deindustrializing and the industrializing regions and leads to two novel results: (1) when agglomeration takes place, growth is lower in the periphery; (2) agglomeration may have a negative effect on the growth rate of real income, both at the regional and at the aggregate level. Our conclusions have relevant policy implications: contrary to the standard view, current EU and US regional policies favouring industrial dispersion might be welfare-improving both at the regional and the aggregate level and may reduce regional income disparities.     

Optimal Portfolio Choice Under Decision‐Based Model Combinations

We propose a density combination approach featuring combination weights that depend on the past forecast performance of the individual models entering the combination through a utility‐based objective function. We apply this model combination scheme to forecast stock returns, both at the aggregate level and by industry, and investigate its forecasting performance relative to a host of existing combination methods, both within the class of linear and time‐varying coefficients, stochastic volatility models. Overall, we find that our combination scheme produces markedly more accurate predictions than the existing alternatives, both in terms of statistical and economic measures of out‐of‐sample predictability. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Forecasting Consumption: the Role of Consumer Confidence in Real Time with many Predictors

We study the role of consumer confidence in forecasting real personal consumption expenditure, and contribute to the extant literature in three substantive ways. First, we re‐examine existing empirical models of consumption and consumer confidence, not only at the quarterly frequency, but using monthly data as well. Second, we employ real‐time data in addition to commonly used revised vintages. Third, we investigate the role of consumer confidence in a rich information context. We produce forecasts of consumption expenditures with and without consumer confidence measures using a dynamic factor model and a large, real‐time, jagged‐edge dataset. In a robust way, we establish the important role of confidence surveys in improving the accuracy of consumption forecasts, manifesting primarily through the services component. During the recession of 2007–2009, sentiment is found to have a more pervasive effect on all components of aggregate consumption: durables, non‐durables and services. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effect of Urbanization and Industrialization on Energy Use in Emerging Economies: Implications for Sustainable Development

This article investigates the impact of two important socio‐economic variables—urbanization and industrialization—on energy consumption in a panel of emerging economies. The results indicate that income increases energy consumption in both the long run and the short run. In the long run, urbanization decreases energy consumption, while industrialization increases it. Long‐run dynamics are important as evidenced by the estimated coefficient on the error correction term. These results have implications for sustainable development. Economic growth policies designed to increase income and industrialization will increase energy consumption. Since most energy needs in emerging economies are currently met by the burning of fossil fuels, economic growth and industrialization policies will be at odds with sustainable development.     

The macroeconomic implications of corruption in the choice to educate

Educational corruption is a worldwide phenomenon, yet its macroeconomic implications are largely unknown. We formulate a fixed-price bribe model to explore the impact educational corruption may have on growth, income inequality and other factors. When using aggregate ability as our measure of growth, our model produces a v-shaped relationship between growth and corruption, suggesting that corruption is detrimental to growth at lower levels of bribery, but growth enhancing at greater levels. A cross-section of countries is used to empirically test our model and provides qualitative support for our modeling structure. Distributional analysis reveals that an increased prevalence of corruption leads to greater income inequality and reduces the ability of education to signal quality.