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We use data from the 2009 Internet Survey of the Health and Retirement Study to examine the consumption impact of wealth shocks and unemployment during the Great Recession in the US. We find that many households experienced large capital losses in housing and in their financial portfolios, and that a non-trivial fraction of respondents have lost their job. As a consequence of these shocks, many households reduced substantially their expenditures. We estimate that the marginal propensities to consume with respect to housing and financial wealth are 1 and 3.3 percentage points, respectively. In addition, those who became unemployed reduced spending by 10 percent. We also distinguish the effect of perceived transitory and permanent wealth shocks, splitting the sample between households who think that the stock market is likely to recover in a year’s time, and those who don’t. In line with the predictions of standard models of intertemporal choice, we find that the latter group adjusted much more than the former its spending in response to financial wealth shocks.
"Buffer-stock" models of saving are now standard in the consumption literature. This paper builds theoretical foundations for rigorous understanding of the main features of such models, including the existence of a target wealth ratio and the proposition that aggregate consumption growth equals aggregate income growth in a small open economy populated by buffer stock savers. JEL Classification: D81, D91, E21 Keywords: Precautionary Saving, Buffer Stock Saving, Marginal Propensity to Consume, Permanent Income Hypothesis