Financial Liberalisation and Consumption Behaviour

The paper addresses the question of whether financial liberalisation and innovation has significantly altered consumption behaviour by reducing liquidity constraints as capital markets become more flexible. A consumption model in which the permanent income hypothesis and extreme Keynesian consumption functions are nested as special cases is the starting point for this analysis. Estimated values for the sensitivity of consumption to current income for different time periods and for several OECD countries are assessed and compared in the light of various econometric properties, country specific liberalisation measures and a variety of proxies reflecting changing liquidity constraints ...