TY  - JOUR
AU  - Carroll,Christopher D.
AU  - Slacalek,Jiri
AU  - Sommer,Martin
TI  - International Evidence on Sticky Consumption Growth
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13876
PY  - 2008
Y2  - March 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13876
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13876.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Christopher D. Carroll
Department of Economics
Mergenthaler 440
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD 21218
Tel: 410/516-7602
Fax: 410/516-7600
E-Mail: ccarroll@jhu.edu

Jiri Slacalek
European Central Bank
Kaiserstrasse 29
D-60311, Frankfurt am Main
Germany
E-Mail: jiri.slacalek@ecb.int

Martin Sommer
International Monetary Fund
700 19th Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20431
Tel: (202) 623-9998
Fax: (202) 589-9998
E-Mail: msommer@imf.org
AB  - We estimate 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 Campbell and Mankiw (1989) model. In several countries, the sticky-consumption-growth and Campbell-Mankiw models work about equally well.
ER  -