Consumption over the Life Cycle: Facts from Consumer Expenditure Survey Data
利用消费者支出调查数据和半非参数统计模型，估计了控制人口统计、队列和时间效应后的生命周期消费曲线，发现总消费、非耐用品和耐用品支出在生命周期中呈现显著驼峰形态，家庭规模变化解释了约一半的驼峰。
This paper uses Consumer Expenditure Survey data and a seminonparametric statistical model to estimate life cycle profiles of consumption, controlling for demographics, cohort, and time effects. We construct age profiles for total and nondurable consumption as well as expenditure patterns for consumer durables. Special emphasis is placed on the comparison of different approaches to control for changes in demographics over the life cycle. We find significant humps over the life cycle for total, nondurable, and durable expenditures. Changes in household size account for roughly half of these humps. Bootstrap simulations suggest that our empirical estimates are tight in that standard errors are small. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.