Consumption vs. Expenditure / Mark Aguiar, Erik Hurst.

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Aguiar, Mark

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w10307.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2004.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: Standard tests of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) using data on nondurables typically equate expenditures with consumption. However, as noted by Becker (1965), consumption is the output of a home production' function that uses both expenditure and time as inputs. With this in mind, we revisit the retirement consumption puzzle by documenting that the dramatic decline in expenditures at the time of retirement is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent on home production. The innovation of our paper is that we empirically disentangle changes in actual consumption from changes in expenditures. To do so, we use a novel data set which collects detailed food diaries for a large cross-section of U.S. households. We show that despite the decline in food expenditures, neither the quantity nor the quality of food intake deteriorates with retirement status. However, unemployed households experience a decline in consumption commensurate to the impact of job displacement on permanent income. Taken together, the results on retirement and unemployment highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income, while using expenditure alone obscures this difference and leads to false rejections of the PIH.

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Previous	nber w10304 Does "Aggregation Bias" Explain the PPP Puzzle? /	nber w10305 Personal Accounts and Family Retirement /	nber w10306 Rearranging the Family? Income Support and Elderly Living Arrangements in a Low Income Country /	nber w10307 Consumption vs. Expenditure /	nber w10308 Asbestos and the Future of Mass Torts /	nber w10309 Technology Shocks in the New Keynesian Model /	nber w1031 Crime and the Labor Market /	Next

February 2004.

Standard tests of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) using data on nondurables typically equate expenditures with consumption. However, as noted by Becker (1965), consumption is the output of a home production' function that uses both expenditure and time as inputs. With this in mind, we revisit the retirement consumption puzzle by documenting that the dramatic decline in expenditures at the time of retirement is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent on home production. The innovation of our paper is that we empirically disentangle changes in actual consumption from changes in expenditures. To do so, we use a novel data set which collects detailed food diaries for a large cross-section of U.S. households. We show that despite the decline in food expenditures, neither the quantity nor the quality of food intake deteriorates with retirement status. However, unemployed households experience a decline in consumption commensurate to the impact of job displacement on permanent income. Taken together, the results on retirement and unemployment highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income, while using expenditure alone obscures this difference and leads to false rejections of the PIH.