Deep Habits

Morten Ravn and Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe

No 208, 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: This paper generalizes the standard habit formation model to an environment in which agents form habits over individual varieties of goods as opposed to over a composite consumption good. We refer to this preference specification as ‘deep habit formation’. Under deep habits, the demand function faced by individual producers depends on past sales. This feature is typically assumed ad-hoc in customer market and brand switching cost models. A central result of the paper is that deep habits give rise to countercyclical markups, which is in line with the empirical evidence. This result is important because ad-hoc formulations of customer-market and switching-cost models have been criticized for implying procyclical and hence counterfactual markup movements. The paper also provides econometric estimates of the parameters pertaining to the deep habit model

Keywords: Habit formation; customer market models; switching cost models; time varying mark-ups and business cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D12 D42 E30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (108)

Downloads: (external link)
http://faculty.london.edu/mravn/research/deephabits.pdf main text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Deep Habits (2006)
Working Paper: Deep Habits (2004)
Working Paper: Deep Habits (2004)
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:sed004:208

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 (chuichuiche@gmail.com).