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Social Security Benefits, Consumption Expenditure, and the Life Cycle Hypothesis
Abstract
This paper examines the impact of changes in social security benefits on aggregate consumption expenditure. Under the null hypothesis, there should be no contemporaneous effect at the monthly frequency because increases in benefits have always been announced at least 6 weeks prior to payment. The paper develops overwhelming evidence--contrary to the null--that benefits have affected aggregate spending. The results have strong implications for several important issues, including Ricardian equivalence, government policy irrelevance, and the excess sensitivity of consumption to changes in income.
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Citations
Cited by
Anomalies: Saving, Fungibility, and Mental Accounts
Thaler, R. H. (1990) · Journal of Economic Perspectives · doi:10.1257/jep.4.1.193 · Cited by 957
Household Expenditure and the Income Tax Rebates of 2001
Johnson, D. S., Parker, J. A., & Souleles, N. S. (2006) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.96.5.1589 · Cited by 936
The Consumption Response to Income Changes
Jappelli, T., & Pistaferri, L. (2010) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev.economics.050708.142933 · Cited by 704
The Response of Household Consumption to Income Tax Refunds
Souleles, N. S. (1999) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.89.4.947 · Cited by 698
The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics
Akerlof, G. A. (2007) · American Economic Review · doi:10.1257/aer.97.1.5 · Cited by 485
Metadata
- Authors
- Wilcox, D. W.
- Venue
- Journal of Political Economy
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1989-04
- Volume
- 97
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 288-304
- ISSN
- 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-534X
- OpenAlex
- W2077905992
- Cited by
- 178
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 35.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Social Security Benefits, Consumption Expenditure, and the Life Cycle Hypothesis. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/261604
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- Wilcox, D. W. (1989). Social Security Benefits, Consumption Expenditure, and the Life Cycle Hypothesis. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/261604
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
