This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of 'wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as 'habits' in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run wealth effects. In U.S. data, we estimate that the immediate (next-quarter) marginal propensity to consume from a $1 change in housing wealth is about 2 cents, with a final long-run effect around 9 cents. Consistent with several recent studies, we find a housing wealth effect that is substantially larger than the stock wealth effect. We believe that our approach is preferable to the currently popular cointegration-based estimation methods, because neither theory nor evidence justifies faith in the existence of a stable cointegrating vector.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract. We investigate the relevance of the Carroll's sticky information model of inflation expectations for four major European economies (France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom). Using survey data on household and expert inflation expectations we argue that the model adequately captures the dynamics of household inflation expectations. We estimate two alternative parametrizations of the sticky information model which differ in the stationarity assumptions about the underlying series. Our baseline stationary estimation suggests that the average frequency of information updating for the European households is roughly once in 18 months. The vector error-correction model implies households update information about once a year. Terms of use: Documents in THE DYNAMICS OF EUROPEAN INFLATION EXPECTATIONS

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This paper estimates the degree of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth (sometimes interpreted as reflecting consumption habits) for thirteen advanced economies. We find that after controlling for measurement error, consumption growth has a high degree of autocorrelation, with a stickiness parameter of about 0.7 on average across countries. The sticky consumption growth model outperforms the random walk model of Hall (1978) and typically fits the data better than the popular Mankiw (1989) model, though in a few countries, the sticky consumption growth and Campbell-Mankiw models work about equally well. © 2011 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This paper can be downloaded without charge from http://www.ecb.europa.eu or from the Social Science Research Network electronic library at http://ssrn.com/abstract_id=1219542.