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New empirical evidence on the quarterly dynamics of Brazilian aggregate household consumption from 1995 to 2009

This paper presents new econometric specifications for the quarterly behavior of aggregate consumption of Brazilian households from 1995 to 2009. It is argued, in particular, that the use of quarterly measures of both private disposable income (in chained 1995 prices), the credit granted to households (as a % of GDP) and a proxy for real interest rates as explanatory variables for the level of quarterly household consumption lead to well adjusted models "within the sample" with good "out of sample" performance. Moreover, the models presented in this paper point to values of the (approximated) private income elasticity around 0.4 and credit and interest (semi) elasticities of household consumption around 2% and -2%, respectively.

Quarterly aggregate consumption of Brazilian households; private disposable income; cointegration models with structural breaks; state-space models; markov-switching models


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