Dynamic Consumption Behavior: Evidence from Japanese Household Panel Data (This paper was revised as 06-184 in August 2006)

Household consumption and saving behavior have been the central theme of recent macroeconomic literature. Following the work of Robert Hall (1978) and a series of papers by Fumio Hayashi, the focus of the literature has been on dynamic consumption behavior. Using the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), we conducted a dynamic panel analysis of consumption behavior. We examined intertemporal smoothing and the durability of consumption behavior with or without liquidity constraints. Our results are summarized as follows: (1) households with debt as well as debt-free households with low annual incomes and net savings faced disposable income constraints; (2) for these types of households, parameter values between MLE and GMM are very close and therefore statistically significant and the implications for each remain more or less the same; (3) debt-free households with high annual incomes and net savings also faced a disposable income constraint in MLE..