Consumption Smoothing - Model

Model

Robert Hall (1978) formalized Friedman's idea. By taking into account the diminishing returns to consumption, and therefore, assuming a concave utility function, he showed that agents optimally would choose to keep a stable path of consumption.

With (cf. Hall's paper)

being the mathematical expectation conditional on all information available in
being the agent's rate of time preference
being the real rate of interest in
being the strictly concave one-period utility function
being the consumption in
being the earnings in
being the assets, apart from human capital, in .

agents choose the consumption path that maximizes:

Subject to a sequence of budget constraints:

The first order necessary condition in this case will be:

By assuming that we obtain, for the previous equation:

Which, due to the concavity of the utility function, implies:

Thus, rational agents would expect to achieve the same consumption in every period.

Hall also showed that for a quadratic utility function, the optimal consumption is equal to:

c_{t}=\left \left[ E_{t}\sum_{i=0}^{\infty }\left( \frac{1}{1+r}\right) ^{i}y_{t+i}+A_{t}\right]

This expression shows that agents choose to consume a fraction of their present discounted value of their human and financial wealth.


Read more about this topic:  Consumption Smoothing

Famous quotes containing the word model:

    “When you model yourself on people, you should try to resemble their good sides.”
    —Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)

    “...that absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent—the State, family life, secular art and science—was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.”
    —Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    “If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.”
    —James Mcneill Whistler (1834–1903)