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The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers are impatient and are subject to transitory as well as permanent shocks, the optimal marginal propensity to consume out of permanent shocks (the MPCP) is strictly less than 1, because buffer stock savers have a target wealth-to-permanent-income ratio; a positive shock to permanent income moves the ratio below its target, temporarily boosting saving. Keywords: Risk, Uncertainty, Consumption, Precautionary Saving, Buffer Stock Saving, Permanent Income Hypothesis.
This paper introduces a method for solving numerical dynamic stochastic optimization problems that avoids rootfinding operations. The idea is applicable to many microeconomic and macroeconomic problems, including life cycle, buffer-stock, and stochastic growth problems. Software is provided. Klassifikation: C6, D9, E2 . July 28, 2005.
We present a tractable model of the effects of nonfinancial risk on intertemporal choice. Our purpose is to provide a simple framework that can be adopted in fields like representative-agent macroeconomics, corporate finance, or political economy, where most modelers have chosen not to incorporate serious nonfinancial risk because available methods were too complex to yield transparent insights. Our model produces an intuitive analytical formula for target assets, and we show how to analyze transition dynamics using a familiar Ramsey-style phase diagram. Despite its starkness, our model captures most of the key implications of nonfinancial risk for intertemporal choice.