Euler Equations, Subjective Expectations and Income Shocks

 

By:	Attanasio, Orazio (UCL) ; Kovacs, Agnes (University of Oxford) ; Molnar, Krisztina (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration)
In this paper, we make three substantive contributions: first, we use elicited subjective income expectations to identify the levels of permanent and transitory income shocks in a life-cycle framework; second, we use these shocks to assess whether households’ consumption is insulated from them; third, we use the shock data to estimate an Euler equation for consumption. We find that households are able to smooth transitory shocks, but adjust their consumption in response to permanent shocks, albeit not fully. The estimates of the Euler equation parameters with and without expectational errors are similar, which is consistent with rational expectations. We break new ground by combining data on subjective expectations about future income from the Michigan Survey with micro data on actual Income from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
Keywords:	life cycle models; estimating Euler Equations; survey expectations
JEL:	C13 D12 D84 D91 E21
URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2017_005&r=ltv