Code for "Can Consumers Distinguish Persistent from Transitory Income Shocks?", Druedahl and Jørgensen, 2020.

1. MATLAB
2. C++ compiler

The code was run and tested with "MATLAB 2018b" and "Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018 for C++" on a 64-bit Windows machine.

vectorclass: The code relies on the vectorclass library developed by Agnar Fog.

Alternative C++ compiler: You can alternatively install the "MinGW GCC" C++ compiler extension to MATLAB. Set intel = 0 in run_00_all.m. If you use another MATLAB version change the path to libgomp.a in compile_mex.m accordingly.

Everything can be run from run_00_all.m. It calls all the run_*.m files in the correct order.

1. Input: PSID data in psid/*.txt.
2. Output: All figures and tables are saved in fig_tabs/.

Computation time: We have included a switch, DO_SMALL, in the main MATLAB file run_00_all.m. If its value is 0 the full Monte Carlo results with 200 runs will be produced. If its value is 1 (the default) only 5 Monte Carlo runs will be executed. Running the code with DO_SMALL = 0 takes about 10 days and 12 hours using 56 threads on a computer with 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 3.00 GHz CPUs (18 cores, 36 logical processes each). Running the code with DO_SMALL = 1 takes around 19 hours using the same computer specified above, but does not reproduce the Monte Carlo results in the paper.

Mapping between folders and results in the paper: All results are placed in the "figs_tab" folder which includes a set of sub-folder. Here is the list of figures and tables from the main text and the supplemental material:

1. Figure 1 and 2 is in the folder "full_MC"
2. Figure 3 is in the folder "full"
3. Figure 4 is in the folder "sigma_eps_full"
4. Figure 5 is in the folders "full_pref" (panels a and b) and "beta_full" (panels c and d)
5. Table 2 is "ceq.tex"
6. Table 3 is "main.tex"
7. Table 4 is "robustness_full.txt"
8. Figure C1 and C2 is in the folder "pers_zero_MC"
9. Figure C3 and C4 is in the folder "pers_MC"
10. Figure C5 is in the folder "pers_beta_MC" (panel a), "pers_psi_MC" (panel b), "pers_xi_MC" (panel c) and "pers_alpha_MC" (panel d)
11. Table C1 is "ceq_tau_low.tex"
12. Table C2 is "ceq_tau_high.tex"
13. Figure C6 is in the folder "ceq"
14. Figure C7 is in the folder "PT"
15. Figure C8 is in the folder "pers"
16. Figure C9 is in the folder "sigma_eps_PT"
17. Figure C10 is in the folder "sigma_eps_pers"
18. Table C3 is "robustness_PT.txt"
19. Table C4 is "robustness_pers.txt"
20. Figure C11 is in the folder "omega_Commault"
21. Figure C12 is in the folder "sigma_eps_PT" (panels a and b), "sigma_eps_pers" (panels c and d) and "sigma_eps_full" (panels e and f)

The used PSID data is found in psid/*.txt.

To reproduce these txt-files run psid/construct_data.do varying the value of scalar group from 0 to 1 and 2. The code uses psid/data3.dta taken from the replication package for Blundell et. al. (2008). The psid/construct_data.do file is based on mindist_AER.do from this replication package.