TY - JOUR AU - Fernandez-Villaverde, Jesus AU - Krueger, Dirk TI - Consumption over the Life Cycle: Facts from Consumer Expenditure Survey Data JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 9382 PY - 2002 Y2 - December 2002 DO - 10.3386/w9382 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9382 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9382.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde Department of Economics University of Pennsylvania The Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics 133 South 36th Street Suite 150 Philadelphia, PA 19104 E-Mail: jesusfv@econ.upenn.edu Dirk Krueger Economics Department University of Pennsylvania The Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics 133 South 36th Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 Tel: 215/898-6691 Fax: 215/573-2057 E-Mail: dkrueger@econ.upenn.edu AB - This paper uses a seminonparametric model and Consumer Expenditure Survey data to estimate life cycle profiles of consumption, controlling for demographics, cohort and time e.ects. In addition to documenting profiles for total and nondurable consumption, we devote special attention to the age expenditure pattern for consumer durables. We find hump-shaped paths over the life cycle for total, for nondurable and for durable expenditures. Changes in household size account for roughly half of these humps. The other half remains unaccounted for by the standard complete markets life cycle model. Our results imply that households do not smooth consumption over their lifetimes. This is especially true for services from consumer durables. Bootstrap simulations suggest that our empirical estimates are tight and sensitivity analysis indicates that the computed profiles are robust to a large number of different specifications. ER -