The Financial Biography of an Economist: Income, Saving, and Wealth (Mostly Pension Wealth)

In this paper we examine the consumption behavior of a single twentieth-century economist (Bodkin) over the course of his academic career. We find that the consumption behavior of Bodkin, a long-time student of the consumption function, does not conform to any of the standard models over the entire 1958–2000 period. Instead, we observe a shift from “Keynesian” to life-cycle behavior in response to a court decision that changed Bodkin’s long-term employment income prospects, a finding that lends support to the arguments of Katona and Akerlof that the effect of psychological factors on consumption cannot be ignored.