Household income uncertainties over three decades

Abstract

We study the trend in household income uncertainty using a novel approach that measures income uncertainty at each future horizon as the variance of forecast errors without imposing specific parametric restrictions on the underlying income shocks. We document a widespread increase in household income uncertainty since the early 1970s that is both statistically and economically significant. For example, our measure of near-future uncertainty in total family non-capital income rose about 40% between 1971 and 2002. This rising uncertainty is likely due to the increase in variances of both persistent and transitory income shocks. A parsimoniously calibrated Aiyagari model is solved to illustrate how rising income uncertainty should have affected aggregate saving. Published by Oxford University Press 2015. This work is written by US Government employees and is in the public domain in the US.