Consumption over the Life Cycle: Some Facts from Consumer Expenditure Survey Data

Dirk Krueger and Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde

No 173, 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper uses a seminonparametric model and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to estimate life cycle profiles of consumption, controlling for demographics, cohort and time effects. In addition to documenting profiles for total and nondurable consumption, we devote special attention to the age expenditure pattern for consumer durables. We find hump-shaped paths over the life cycle for total, for nondurable and for durable expenditures. Changes in household size account for roughly half of these humps. The other half remains unaccounted for by the standard complete markets life cycle model. Our results imply that households do not smooth consumption over their lifetimes. This is especially the case for services from consumer durables. Bootstrap simulations suggest that our empirical estimates are tight and sensitivity analysis indicates that the computed profiles are robust to a large number of different specifications.

Keywords: Consumption; Durables; CEX (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/empiricalpaper.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.econ.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/empiricalpaper.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/empiricalpaper.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Consumption over the Life Cycle: Some Facts from Consumer Expenditure Survey Data (2003)
Working Paper: Consumption over the Life Cycle: Some Facts from Consumer Expenditure Survey Data (2002)
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:red:sed004:173

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().