A RETROSPECTIVE ON FRIEDMAN’S
THEORY OF PERMANENT INCOME
Costas Meghir
THE INSTITUTE FOR FISCAL STUDIES
WP04/01
A Retrospective on Friedman’s Theory of Permanent Income
Costas Meghir
1
University College London and Institute for Fiscal Studies
November 2002
This Version January 2004
Abstract
Friedman’s book on the “Consumption Function” is one of the great works of Economics
demonstrating how the interplay between theoretical ideas and data analysis could lead to
major policy implications. We present a short review of Friedman’s Permanent Income
Hypothesis, the origins of the idea and its theoretical foundations. We give a brief
overview of its influence in modern economics and discuss some relevant empirical
results and the way they relate to the original approach taken by Friedman.
1
Acknowledgements: This article was prepared for a conference in honour of Milton Friedman at the
University of Chicago in November 2002, on the occasion of his 90
th
Birthday. I thank the organisers for
the invitation. I also thank Orazio Attanasio, Richard Blundell, Martin Browning, Jim Heckman, Hide
Ichimura, an anonymous referee and colleagues at IFS and UCL for useful discussions that helped me
organise this presentation. I am of course responsible for all errors and interpretations.
Introduction
Friedman’s book on the “Consumption Function” is one of the great works of Economics
demonstrating how the interplay between theoretical ideas and data analysis could lead to
major policy implications. The theory of the Consumption function played an important
role in explaining why traditional Keynesian demand management, through transitory tax
policy or other transitory income boosting measures can have little or no effect on real
consumption and on the desired policy outcomes. The apparently simple ideas in this
excellent book have been so insightful and powerful that they have given rise to a huge
amount of research, both theoretical and empirical, which continues to this date. In this
short article I trace out some of the research relating to the Permanent Income Hypothesis
(PIH), particularly that which has been based on microeconomic data, and I demonstrate
the relevance of these ideas for our current way of thinking about consumption, savings
and income processes.
Friedman and Kuznets (1954) “Incomes from Independent Professional Practice” which
was actually written in the early 1940s but delayed in publication, first formulated many
of the ideas of the PIH, including the permanent/transitory decomposition of income in
the volume. The core of these ideas, together with further tests, was brought together in
Friedman’s “Consumption function”. In my review of the PIH I draw mainly from this
latter work.
The Permanent Income Hypothesis
A statement of the Hypothesis
Milton Friedman’s PI hypothesis originates from the basic intuition that individuals
would wish to smooth consumption and not let it fluctuate with short run fluctuations in
income. In fact the model was developed to explain important empirical facts in a unified
framework. For example, why is income more volatile than consumption and why is the
long run marginal propensity to consume out of income higher than the short run one. To
answer these questions Friedman hypothesized that individuals base their consumption on
a longer term view of an income measure, perhaps a notion of lifetime wealth or a notion
of wealth over a reasonably long horizon. The basic hypothesis posited is that individuals
consume a fraction of this permanent income in each period and thus the average
propensity to consume would equal the marginal propensity to consume. The propensity
itself could vary with a number of factors, including the interest rate and taste shifter
variables, or could reflect uncertainty – we will return to these important insights below.
Friedman set himself the task of testing his hypothesis against an increasing set of
empirical facts from time series data and budget studies. The standard least squares
regression of consumption on income would always point to a marginal propensity to
consume below the average propensity. Conditioning on extra regressors seems to make
things worse. It is at this point that Friedman’s ingenuity, brought together the literature
on budget studies by Margaret Reid, Morgan and others
2
, as well as time series analyses
with Econometric ideas on measurement error to devise estimation techniques, that not
only allowed the testing of the basic hypothesis, but led to the estimation of underlying
parameters that directly characterised the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH). As far as
the role of measurement error is concerned the works of great economists and
statisticians of the time, namely Harold Hotelling
3
and James Durbin, influenced
Friedman. He brings together empirical results and statistical theory, and develops new
results by combining these with his economic ideas.
The ingredients of Friedman’s model are permanent consumption (
p
c
), permanent
income (
p
y ), transitory consumption (
t
c ), transitory income (
t
y ). Measured income is
the sum of
permanent and transitory income (
t
y
) and measured consumption is the sum
of
permanent and transitory consumption (
t
c
), i.e.
tp
ccc +=
and
tp
yyy +=
Permanent consumption is determined by the equation
pp
yzrkc ),(=
where
),( zrk is the average (or marginal) propensity to consume out of permanent
income which depends on the rate of interest and on taste shifter variables z. The
2
See Reid (1952) and Morgan (1951).
3
See Hotelling (1933) and Friedman (1992) on the regression fallacy.
