Risk-sharing, altruism, and the factor structure of consumption

Joseph Altonji, Fumio Hayashi and Laurence Kotlikoff

No 48, Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: We consider four models of consumption that differ with respect to efficient risk-sharing and altruism. They range from complete markets with altruism to family risk-sharing. We use a matched sample of parents and independent children available from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to discriminate between the four models. Our testing procedure is designed to deal with the set of observed independent children being endogenously selected. The combined hypothesis of complete markets and altruism can be decisively rejected, while we fail to reject altruism and hence family risk-sharing for a subset of families.

Keywords: Consumption (Economics); Altruism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/common/pub_detail.cfm?pb_autonum_id=46 (application/pdf)
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/DP/DP48.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Risk-Sharing, Altruism, and the Factor Structure of Consumption (1991)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmem:48

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jannelle Ruswick ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).