The Response of Household Expenditure to Anticipated Income Changes: Bonus Payments and the Seasonality of Consumption in Japan

Masahiro Hori and Satoshi Shimizutani

The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, 2009, vol. 9, issue 1, 22

Abstract: This paper exploits a notable institutional feature of salary payments in Japan, the bonus system, to examine whether households smooth consumption under large and regular income changes. Using high quality household-level data from the Japanese Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), our statistical tests show that the consumption seasonality of bonus receiving households is significantly affected by the bonus payments. Although our estimate of the marginal propensity to consume from bonus income is much smaller than that from smaller and less predictable end-of-year tax refunds, it is positive and significantly different from zero, which contrasts to earlier studies on large and regular income changes.

Keywords: consumption smoothing; life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis; bonus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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DOI: 10.2202/1935-1690.1908

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