Elasticity of intertemporal substitution
In economics, elasticity of intertemporal substitution (or intertemporal elasticity of substitution, EIS, IES) is a measure of responsiveness of the growth rate of consumption to the real interest rate.
[1] If the real interest rate rises, current consumption may decrease due to increased return on savings; but current consumption may also increase as the household decides to consume more immediately, as it is feeling richer.
The net effect on current consumption is the elasticity of intertemporal substitution.
[2] There are in general two ways to define the EIS.
The second way is to explicitly derive it as an elasticity.
The two ways generally yield the same definition.
denotes consumption level, the EIS is defined as
Notice that this definition is the inverse of relative risk aversion.
In usual economic applications, there is restriction
, the utility curve becomes more linear, indicating that the agent does not attempt to smooth consumption over time, similar to how a risk-neutral agent does not prefer gambles with smoother outcomes.
The derivation differs for discrete and continuous time.
We will see that for CRRA utility, the two approaches yield the same answer.
The below functional forms assume that utility from consumption is time additively separable.
Total lifetime utility is given by In this setting, the gross real interest rate
units of utility, and so must yield exactly that number of units of utility in the future when saved at the prevailing gross interest rate
is the net interest rate (if it yielded more, then the agent could make himself better off by saving more).
Solving for the gross interest rate, we see that In logs, we have Since
(logs are very close to percentage changes) we have The elasticity of intertemporal substitution is defined as the percent change in consumption growth per percent increase in the net interest rate: By substituting in our log equation above, we can see that this definition is equivalent to the elasticity of consumption growth with respect to marginal utility growth: Either definition is correct, however, assuming that the agent is optimizing and has time separable utility.
Thus, This can be rewritten as Hence, applying the above derived formula Let total lifetime utility be given by
is the utility of consumption in (instant) time t, and
First define the measure of relative risk aversion (this is useful even if the model has no uncertainty or risk) as, then the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is defined as
In general, a low value of theta (high intertemporal elasticity) means that consumption growth is very sensitive to changes in the real interest rate.
For theta equal to 1, the growth rate of consumption responds one for one to changes in the real interest rate.
A high theta implies an insensitive consumption growth.
In the Ramsey growth model, the elasticity of intertemporal substitution determines the speed of adjustment to the steady state and the behavior of the saving rate during the transition.
If the elasticity is high, then large changes in consumption are not very costly to consumers and, as a result, if the real interest rate is high, they will save a large portion of their income.
If the elasticity is low, the consumption smoothing motive is very strong and because of this consumers will save a little and consume a lot if the real interest rate is high.
Empirical estimates of the elasticity vary.
Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that microeconomic studies come to different conclusions than macroeconomic studies, which use aggregate data.
A meta-analysis of 169 published studies reports a mean elasticity of 0.5, but also substantial differences across countries.
