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Saving and Liquidity Constraints
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In this paper, the authors consider the problem of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow, and the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior.Abstract:
This paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow, and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior. When consumers are relatively impatient, and when labor income is independently and identically distributed over time, assets act like a buffer stock, protecting consumption against bad draws of income. The precautionary demand for saving interacts with the borrowing constraints to provide a motive for holding assets. If the income process is positively autocorrelated, but stationary, assets are still used to buffer consumption, but do so less effectively, and at a greater cost in terms of foregone consumption. In the limit, when labor income is a random walk, it is optimal for impatient liquidity constrained consumers simply to consume their incomes. As a consequence, a liquidity constrained representative agent cannot generate aggregate U.S. saving behavior if that agent receives aggregate labor income. Either there is no saving, when income is a random walk, or saving is contracyclical over the business cycle, when income changes are positively autocorrelated. However, in reality, microeconomic income processes do not resemble their average, and it is possible to construct a model of microeconomic saving under liquidity constraints which, at the aggregate level, reproduces many of the stylized facts in the actual data. While it is clear that many households are not liquidity constrained, and do not behave as described here, the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life-cycle models.read more
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References
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A New Approach to the Economic Analysis of Nonstationary Time Series and the Business Cycle.
TL;DR: In this article, the parameters of an autoregression are viewed as the outcome of a discrete-state Markov process, and an algorithm for drawing such probabilistic inference in the form of a nonlinear iterative filter is presented.
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Consumption and Liquidity Constraints: An Empirical Investigation
TL;DR: In this article, the authors test the permanent income hypothesis against the alternative hypothesis that consumers optimize subject to a well-specified sequence of borrowing constraints, and the results generally support the hypothesis that an inability to borrow against future labor income affects the consumption of a significant portion of the population.
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Precautionary Saving in the Small and in the Large
TL;DR: The Arrow-Pratt theory of risk aversion was shown to be isomorphic to the theory of optimal choice under risk in this paper, making possible the application of a large body of knowledge about risk aversion to precautionary saving.
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The Adjustment of Consumption to Changing Expectations about Future Income
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of current income in providing new information about future income and signalling changes in permanent income is analyzed using time-series analysis to quantify the revision in permanent incomes induced by an innovation in the current income process.
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The Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Aggregate Capital Accumulation
TL;DR: This paper used historical U.S. data to directly estimate the contribution of intergenerational transfers to aggregate capital accumulation and found that only a negligible fraction of actual capital accumulation can be traced to life cycle or "hump" savings.