Intertemporal Choice and Consumption Mobility
利用意大利家庭收入和财富调查面板数据，通过消费转移矩阵检验跨期消费理论，发现家庭平滑收入冲击的程度低于永久收入假说的预测，且强烈拒绝消费保险模型。
The theory of intertemporal consumption choice makes sharp predictions about the evolution of the entire distribution of household consumption, not just about its conditional mean. In the paper, we study the empirical transition matrix of consumption using a panel drawn from the Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth. We estimate the parameters that minimize the distance between the empirical and the theoretical transition matrix of the consumption distribution. The transition matrix generated by our estimates matches remarkably well the empirical matrix, both in the aggregate and in samples stratified by education. Our estimates strongly reject the consumption insurance model and suggest that households smooth income shocks to a lesser extent than implied by the permanent income hypothesis.