Search

This paper tests the prediction of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) that news about future income induce a revision in consumption equal to the revision in permanent income. We use time-series data from 48 contiguous U.S. states to perform the test. The empirical results provide some support for the PIH across states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes relatively unexplored Canadian provincial-level data to investigate an old but still relevant question in macroeconomics as to whether consumption responds to income innovations in a manner consistent with the stochastic implications of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH). The empirical results obtained do not appear to be in accord with the PIH. Instead, consumption's response to income innovations is found to be much weaker than that predicted by PIH; in particular, the response displays an asymmetric pattern in the sense that it is much stronger for negative than positive income innovations. We interpret this evidence of asymmetry as indicative of the presence of liquidity constraints in provincial households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Canadian data, the consumption-based asset pricing model is studied, defined in terms of nondurable and durable goods consumption. A two-stage estimation procedure is used, which takes account of the presence of common stochastic trends in the forcing processes. This method yields more reasonable estimates of the preference parameters than the previous studies did, and the asset-pricing equation is not rejected by the data. Moreover, the preference specification adopted in this paper allows a number of useful economic information to be obtained. The additive separability assumption and the Cobb-Douglas functional form of the utility function are ruled complements in the sense of Edgeworth and Pareto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the idea that a general model of consumption should allow for the direct effect of government expenditures in a two-good permanent-income model. We show, given an assumed preference specification, that there is a cointegration restriction implied by an intraperiod first-order condition of the model. This restriction leads to a linear deterministic cointegration relation between government spending, private consumption, and their relative price that is supported by the data. Using this restriction to recover the preference parameters, we estimate the intraperiod elasticity of substitution for both government and private consumption to be about 0.9. Overall, we find consistent empirical evidence in support of our model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates and tests several versions of the consumption-based asset pricing model extended to allow for time-nonseparable preferences and/or liquidity constraint proxies, using Canadian aggregate data. It is found that a habit-persistence effect uncovered in the time-nonseparable preference model is due to the model's misspecification and that liquidity constraints have significant effects on an individual's intertemporal consumption behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an empirical investigation into the permanent income hypothesis taking evidence from the Canadian data. The objective of the paper is to investigate whether aggregate consumption in postwar Canada shares similar features to the findings for the U.S. Recently, researchers J.Y. Campbell and G.N. Mankiw (CM) have demonstrated that most empirical findings in the aggregate consumption literature can be explained by a simple model in which some fraction of income accrues to individuals who consume their current income each period and the remainder accrues to individuals whose consumption behaviour is predicted by the consumption-based asset pricing model. For the U.S. data, researchers report that the fraction of income going to current income consumers is in the range of 35 to 50%. The paper departs on several points from CM study in which the first-order condition is linearized by essentially assuming that the joint distribution of asset returns and consumption is conditionally lognormal and homoscedastic.