Search Results
Conference Paper
Housing, credit and consumer expenditure: commentary
Journal Article
Monetary policy transmission through the consumption-wealth channel
Paper for a conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York entitled Financial Innovation and Monetary Transmission
Journal Article
Does consumer confidence forecast household expenditure? a sentiment index horse race
This article is the first formal investigation of consumer attitudes that compares the forecasting power of the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment and the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index. The authors find that measures available from the Conference Board have both economically and statistically significant explanatory power for several categories of consumer spending. By contrast, measures available from the University of Michigan generally exhibit weaker forecasting power for most categories of spending. As part of their analysis, the authors examine the ways ...
Journal Article
How important is the stock market effect on consumption?
Many argue that the astonishing growth in Americans' stock portfolios in the 1990s has been a major force behind the growth of consumer spending. This article reviews the relationship between stock market movements and consumption. Using various econometric techniques and specifications, the authors find that the propensity to consume out of aggregate household wealth has exhibited instability over the postwar period. They also show that the dynamic response of consumption growth to an unexpected change in wealth is extremely short-lived, implying that forecasts of consumption growth one or ...
Report
Consumption and credit: a model of time-varying liquidity constraints
This paper investigates the role of consumer credit in determining real consumption growth in aggregate, post-war U.S. data. This paper presents evidence that predictable growth in consumer credit is significantly related to consumption growth. The finding is inconsistent with the predictions of (I) the permanent income/life cycle hypothesis, (ii) the "rule of thumb" models where some agents simply consume their current income, and (iii) models of liquidity constraints where individuals face a fixed borrowing limit. I argue that this finding calls for reinterpretation of the excess ...
Report
The channel of monetary transmission to demand: evidence from the market for automobile credit
In response to tight money, both consumer loans and consumption fall. In this paper, I ask whether there is any causality running from loans to consumption by focusing on hw the composition of automobile finance between bank and nonbank sources of credit changes in response to unanticipated innovations in monetary policy. The results indicate that contractionary monetary policy reduces the supply of bank consumer loans, which in turn produces a decline in real consumption. The evidence is therefore supportive of a credit channel theory of monetary transmission to aggregate consumption. ...
Report
Consumer sentiment and household expenditure: reevaluating the forecasting equations
This paper reestimates the simple forecasting regressions in Carroll, Fuhrer, and Wilcox (1993) (CFW), which investigate the predictive power of consumer sentiment for consumption growth. Durability in the consumption categories analyzed implies that the error term may be distributed as an MA(1), indicating that ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation is inappropriate when variables lagged one period are used in the forecasting equation. I reestimate the forecasting regressions using nonlinear least squares (NLLS), explicitly accounting for a moving average error structure. In addition, I ...
Report
Elasticities of substitution in real business cycle models with home production
Recently, there has been considerable interest in modifying the standard real business cycle model to include home production. In this paper, we construct a simple model of home production that demonstrates the connection between the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES), and the elasticity of substitution between home and market consumption. Understanding this connection is important because there is much larger body of empirical evidence on the size of the IES than there is on the size of the static home-market substitution elasticity. We use this framework to shed light on the ...
Report
Does consumer confidence forecast household expenditure?: A sentiment index horse race
This paper investigates the forecasting power of consumer sentiment for household expenditure. We compare the predictive power of two measures of consumer attitudes, and then further compare each survey's expectations component with one another, and with the broader sentiment measures. The results indicate that lagged values of the Conference Board's overall confidence and expectations measures have stronger incremental power for more categories of the growth in consumption expenditure than do measures available from the University of Michigan, though the latter is correlated with future ...