A relação intertemporal entre educação e consumo: os consumidores mais escolarizados são mais pacientes?

Abstract

This work aims to evaluate the intertemporal relationship between schooling and consumption in Brazil. More specifically, we seek to investigate whether more educated consumers are more patient than the less schooling. We use a version of the model of Lawrance (1991), in which she estimates the intertemporal discount rate using U.S. microdata. The model, originally estimated by panel data, was adapted to Brazilian data. The dataset comes from the Household Survey of Familiar Budgets (POF) from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), for the years 2008-2009 and 2002-2003. Data were grouped into cohorts and then we estimated the Euler equation arising from the maximization problem of the consumer. The intertemporal discount rate was calculated using the results of this regression and the moments of the residuals. The results indicate that: i) both the regressions and the intertemporal rate of discount are robust to the use of different interest rates; ii) the estimated intertemporal elasticity of substitution and intertemporal discount rate are close to the values found by Lawrance (1991) and iii) the main question of this study is corroborated, i.e., cohorts located in the highest deciles of schooling have lower intertemporal discount rates.