Consumption vs. Expenditure
Consumption vs. Expenditure
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消费与支出
DOI：
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发表时间：
2004
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Erik Hurst
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文献类型：
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作者：
Mark Aguiar;Erik Hurst
使用非耐用品数据的永久收入假设（PIH）的标准检验通常将支出与消费等同起来。然而，正如Becker（1965）所指出的那样，消费是“家庭生产”函数的输出，它将支出和时间都作为输入。时间价值较低的个人将把更多的时间花在家庭生产上，而较少的时间花在给定单位消费的市场支出上。考虑到这一点，我们通过记录退休时支出的急剧下降与家庭生产时间的同样急剧增加相匹配来重新审视退休消费之谜。本文的创新之处在于，我们从经验上将实际消费的变化与支出的变化区分开来。为此，我们使用了一套新颖的数据集，该数据集收集了大量美国家庭的详细食物日记。我们表明，尽管食物支出下降，但食物摄入的数量和质量都没有随着退休状态而恶化。使用实际消费的度量，我们直接检验了永久收入假设，并发现随着个人过渡到退休，财富的边际价值保持不变。我们表明，在保持实际消费不变的情况下，花在家庭生产上的时间的增加在数量上足以解释支出的下降。最后，我们表明，失业家庭的消费下降与失业对永久收入的影响相称。综上所述，关于退休和失业的结果突出了消费的直接指标如何区分预期和意外的收入冲击，而单独使用支出模糊了这种差异，并导致对个人健康指数的错误拒绝。
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. Individuals with lower values of time will spend more time on home production and less on market expenditures for a given unit of consumption. 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. Using our measures of actual consumption, we directly test the Permanent Income Hypothesis and find that the marginal value of wealth remains constant as individuals transition into retirement. We show that the increase in time spent on home production is quantitatively large enough to explain the decline in expenditure, holding actual consumption constant. Lastly, we show that 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.