Nonlinear Household Earnings Dynamics, Self-Insurance, and Welfare
估计了两种家庭税后收入过程，发现包含年龄依赖、非正态性和非线性的更丰富收入动态能更好拟合生命周期消费不平等演变和个体消费保险程度，并降低收入风险的福利成本。
Abstract Earnings dynamics are much richer than typically assumed in macro models with heterogeneous agents. This holds for individual-pre-tax and household-post-tax earnings and across administrative and survey data. We estimate two alternative processes for household after-tax earnings and study their implications using a standard life-cycle model. Both processes feature a persistent and a transitory component, but although the first one is the canonical linear process with stationary shocks, the second one has substantially richer earnings dynamics, allowing for age-dependence of moments, non-normality, and nonlinearity in previous earnings and age. Allowing for richer earnings dynamics implies a substantially better fit of the evolution of cross-sectional consumption inequality over the life cycle and of the individual-level degree of consumption insurance against persistent earnings shocks. The richer earnings process implies lower welfare costs of earnings risk.