We estimate the degree of ‘stickiness’ in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that, after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of auto-correlation, with a stickiness...

Recent empirical work on the strength of precautionary saving has yielded widely varying conclusions. The mixed findings may reflect a number of difficulties in proxying uncertainty, executing instrumental variables estimation, and incorporating theoretical restrictions into empirical models....

This is an entry for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Ed.