We study a general class of consumption-savings problems with recursive preferences. We characterize the sign of the consumption response to arbitrary shocks in terms of the product of two sufficient statistics: the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) between contemporaneous...

We define the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) for general recursive preferences and identify sharp comparative statics from a general dynamic portfolio choice problem. In many cases, when preferences are homothetic, if EIS is smaller (larger) than 1, an investor will decrease...