Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/183427 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
IFN Working Paper No. 1198
Publisher: 
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Stockholm
Abstract: 
This paper employs Swedish data containing security level information on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We exploit households' portfolio weights in previous years as an instrument for actual capital gains and dividends payments. We find that unrealized capital gains lead to a marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 13 percent for the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution but a flat 5 percent for the rest of the distribution. We also find that households' consumption is significantly more responsive to dividend payouts across all parts of the wealth distribution. Our findings are broadly consistent with near-rational behavior in which households optimize their consumption with respect to capital gains and dividends income as if they were separate sources of income.
Subjects: 
Capital gain
Dividend income
Consumption
Near-rational behavior
JEL: 
D15
E21
G12
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
1.47 MB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.