Structural Break or Asymmetry? An Empirical Study of the Stock Wealth Effect on Consumption

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the stock wealth effect of consumption exhibits structural change(s) or behaves asymmetrically over business cycles. We first perform a general test of linearity for the behavior of aggregate consumption in response to changes in stock wealth based on Hamilton's (2001) approach. When a nonlinear relation is discovered, we move on to investigate the source(s) of this nonlinearity. We consider two types of nonlinearity: structural break and asymmetry. It is of interest to policy makers whether the sensitivity of consumption to changes in households' financial wealth shows a significant shift over time due to institutional and policy changes, and whether consumption is likely to decline more due to stock wealth shrinkage when the economy is in a downturn, as has been found in investme