Britannica Money (2024)

consumption function, in economics, the relationship between consumer spending and the various factors determining it. At the household or family level, these factors may include income, wealth, expectations about the level and riskiness of future income or wealth, interest rates, age, education, and family size. The consumption function is also influenced by the consumer’s preferences (e.g., patience, or the willingness to delay gratification), by the consumer’s attitude toward risk, and by whether the consumer wishes to leave a bequest (see legacy). The characteristics of consumption functions are important for many questions in both macroeconomics and microeconomics.

In macroeconomic models the consumption function tracks total aggregate consumption expenditures; for simplicity it is assumed to depend on a basic subset of the factors economists believe are important at the household level. Analysis of consumption expenditure is important for understanding short-term (business cycle) fluctuations and for examining long-run issues such as the level of interest rates and the size of the capital stock (the amount of buildings, machinery, and other reproducible assets useful in producing goods and services). In principle, the consumption function provides answers to both short-run and long-run questions. In the long run, since income that is not consumed is saved, the responsiveness of households to any tax policy (such as those meant to spur aggregate saving and increase the capital stock) will depend on the structure of the consumption function and particularly what it says about how saving responds to interest rates. In the short run, the effectiveness of tax cuts or other income-boosting policies (such as those meant to stimulate a recessionary economy) will depend on what the consumption function says about how much the typical recipient spends or saves out of the extra income.

At the microeconomic level the structure of the consumption function is of interest in itself, but it also has a powerful influence on many other kinds of economic behaviour. For example, individuals with only a small stock of savings who are laid off from their jobs may be forced to take new jobs quickly, even if those jobs are a poor match for their skills. On the other hand, laid-off consumers with substantial savings may be able to wait until they can find a better job match. Whether a consumer is likely to have much savings when laid off will depend on the degree of patience reflected in the consumption function.

The standard version of the consumption function emerges from the “life-cycle” theory of consumption behaviour articulated by economist Franco Modigliani. The life-cycle theory assumes that household members choose their current expenditures optimally, taking account of their spending needs and future income over the remainder of their lifetimes. Modern versions of this model incorporate borrowing limits, income or employment uncertainty, and uncertainty about other important factors such as life expectancy.

Economist Milton Friedman advocated a simplified version of this model, known as the “permanent income hypothesis,” which abstracts from retirement saving decisions. The figure shows the consumption function that emerges from a standard version of the permanent income hypothesis (assuming uncertain future income and a standard “utility function” that specifies consumers’ attitudes toward the level and riskiness of their spending). The figure relates the consumer’s current stock of spendable resources (also known as “cash on hand,” or the sum of current income and spendable assets) to his or her level of spending. Perhaps the most important feature of the figure, for both microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis, is what it says about the marginal propensity to consume (MPC)—that is, how much extra spending will result from a given increase in cash on hand. When levels of cash on hand are low, the MPC is very high, indicating that poor households are likely to spend any windfall income rather quickly. However, when levels of cash on hand are high (that is, for wealthy households), the MPC becomes quite low, suggesting that a windfall will prompt only a small increase in current spending. Several strands of empirical research confirm the proposition that low-wealth households exhibit higher MPCs than high-wealth households.

This figure demonstrates that, when analyzing the short-run macroeconomic effects of a government’s tax and spending policies, it is important to know whether the households affected will be concentrated in the area to the left of the figure, where the extra spending induced by a windfall is high, or to the right of the figure, where the MPC is low. These insights carry over to the more sophisticated life-cycle versions of the model that incorporate retirement planning and other considerations.