Changing a single word in a survey can flip the result of whether the public is 'frugal' or 'living paycheck-to-paycheck.'
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
Eliciting the Marginal Propensity to Consume in Surveys
SSRN · 6504574
The Takeaway
Economists use 'Marginal Propensity to Consume' (MPC) to decide how much stimulus money to send people, but this paper found that different question formats change the result by 500%. It reveals that our core data on whether people save or spend is more a product of survey design than actual human behavior.
From the abstract
Different methods of eliciting the Marginal Propensity to Consume give very different distributions. Mean MPCs range from below 0.1, indicating life-cycle consumers, to over 0.5, consistent with consumers being hand-to-mouth. We conducted a randomized survey experiment to test if this difference arises because of question wording: we compare using a direct question and a filtered question. Survey wording has large effects on (1) the mean MPC, (2) the extensive margin, and (3) how MPCs vary with