Relative Wage Movements and the Distribution of Consumption
分析1980年代美国不同出生队列和教育群体的相对工资变动如何影响家庭消费分布与经济福利，发现群体间消费保险机制严重失效，现有最优消费理论无法解释。
The authors analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare. Their empirical work draws on the best available cross-sectional data sets to construct synthetic panel data on U.S. consumption, labor supply, and wages during the 1980s. The authors find that low-frequency movements in the cohort-education structure of pretax hourly wages among men drove large changes in the distribution of household consumption. The results constitute a spectacular failure of between-group consumption insurance, a failure not explained by existing theories of informationally constrained optimal consumption behavior. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.