Inflation and consumption in a long term perspective with level shift

This article examines the existence and stability of the consumption function in the United States of America (US) economy during a sample period, beginning in the 1950s. In order to obtain a stable long run relationship, we have introduced two innovative elements into the analysis of the life-cycle of the consumption function with wealth effects: 1) a shift level break in the cointegrating relationship, and 2) using inflation as an additional explanatory variable. By implementing a well structured estimation strategy we found that, after taking the shift level break into account, a cointegration including inflation exists and is more stable for the critical sub-samples than traditional consumption function models.