Are Our Data Relevant to the Theory? The Case of Aggregate Consumption
指出国民收入账户中的个人消费支出数据在人口覆盖和消费概念上与永久收入/生命周期假说不一致，调整数据以匹配理论会改变消费时间序列性质的关键结论。
Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) in the National Income and Product Accounts are often used to investigate whether the time series properties of consumption are consistent with the permanent-income/life-cycle hypotheses. In this article, I address the issue of the general quality of the PCE data and its definitional consistency with the typical model of the intertemporal allocation of consumption. I find that, in terms of the population coverage and the consumption concept, the raw PCE data are unsuitable for the analysis of the permanent-income/life-cycle hypotheses. More fundamentally, adjustments to the data to provide greater consistency with the theory alter critical conclusions concerning the time series properties of consumption.