This paper argues that the versions of both permanent income and life-cycle theories which have recently become fashionable are inconsistent with the grossest features of cross-country and cross-section data on consumption and income. There is clear evidence that consumption and income growth...

The budget constraint requires that, eventually, consumption must adjust fully to any permanent shock to income. Intuition suggests that, knowing this, optimizing agents will fully adjust their spending immediately upon experiencing a permanent shock. However, this paper shows that if consumers...

We estimate the fraction of the wealth of a sample of PSID respondents that is held because some households face greater income uncertainty than others. We first derive an equation characterizing the theoretical relationship between wealth and uncertainty in a buffer-stock model of saving. Next,...

This paper shows that standard methods for estimating log-linearized consumption Euler equations using micro data cannot successfully uncover structural parameters like the coefficient of relative risk aversion from a dataset of simulated consumers behaving exactly according to the standard...

This paper argues that the typical household's saving is better described by a traditional version of the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis (LC/PIH) model. Buffer-stock behavior emerges if consumers with important income uncertainty are sufficiently impatient. In the traditional model,...

This paper shows that standard empirical methods for estimating log-linearized consumption Euler equations cannot successfully uncover structural parameters like the coefficient of relative risk aversion from the dataset of simulated consumers behaving exactly according to the standard model....

What is the likely future return on stocks, following recent market declines? Christopher Carroll consults the wisdom of Benjamin Graham, John Campbell and Robert Shiller for an answer.