Why is consumption more log normal than income? Gibrat's law revisited

Journal of Political Economy

Volumn 117, Issue 6, 2009, Pages 1140-1154

  Battistin, Erich ^a   Blundell, Richard ^b   Lewbel, Arthur ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PADOVA   (Italy)

^b UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^c BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COHORT ANALYSIS; CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOR; EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS; EXPENDITURE; INCOME DISTRIBUTION;

EID: 73949140334     PISSN: 00223808     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/648995     Document Type: Article

References (13)

1. Battistin, E., R. Blundell, and A. Lewbel. 2007. "Why Is Consumption More Log Normal than Income? Gibrat's Law Revisited." Working Paper no. 08/07, Institute for Fiscal Studies, London; Working Paper no. 671, Dept. Econ., Boston Coll.
2. Blundell, R., L. Pistaferri, and I. Preston. 2008. "Consumption Inequality and Partial Insurance." A.E.R. 98 (5): 1887-1921.
3. Blundell, R., and I. Preston. 1998. "Consumption Inequality and Income Uncertainty." Q.J.E. 113:603-40.
4. Deaton, A. 1992. Understanding Consumption. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
5. Deaton, A., and C. Paxson. 1994. "Intertemporal Choice and Inequality." J.P.E. 102:384-94.
6. Friedman, M. 1957. A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
7. Gibrat, R. 1931. Les inegalites economiques. Paris: Librairie du Recueil Sirey.
8. Groeneveld, R. A., and G. Meeden. 1984. "Measuring Skewness and Kurtosis." Statistician 33 (4): 391-99.
9. Hall, R. E. 1978. "Stochastic Implications of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income Hypothesis: Theory and Evidence." J.P.E. 86:971-87.
10. Hampel, F. R., E. M. Ronchetti, P. J. Rousseeuw, and W. A. Stahel. 1986. Robust Statistics. New York: Wiley.
11. Kalecki, M. 1945. "On the Gibrat Distribution." Econometrica 13:161-70.
12. Moors, J. J. A. 1988. "A Quantile Alternative to Kurtosis." Statistician 37 (1): 25- 32.
13. Wooldridge, J. M., and H. White. 1988. "Some Invariance Principles and Central Limit Theorems for Dependent Heterogeneous Processes." Econometric Theory 4:210-30.