How Much Consumption Insurance beyond Self-Insurance?
- (pp. 53-87)
Abstract
We assess the degree of consumption smoothing implicit in a calibrated life-cycle version of the standard incomplete-markets model, and we compare it to the empirical estimates of Richard Blundell, Luigi Pistaferri, and Ian Preston (2008) (BPP hereafter) on US data. Households in the data have access to more consumption insurance against permanent earnings shocks than in the model. BPP estimate that 36 percent of permanent shocks are insurable, whereas the model's counterpart of the BPP estimator varies between 7 percent and 22 percent, depending on the tightness of debt limits. We also show that the BPP estimator has a downward bias that grows as borrowing limits become tighter. (JEL D31, D91, E21).Citation
Kaplan, Greg, and Giovanni L. Violante. 2010. "How Much Consumption Insurance beyond Self-Insurance?" American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2 (4): 53-87. DOI: 10.1257/mac.2.4.53Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
- D15 Intertemporal Consumer Choice; Life Cycle Models and Saving
- E21 Macroeconomics: Consumption; Saving; Wealth
There are no comments for this article.
Login to Comment