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A central implication of the life-cycle/permanentincome hypothesis (LC/PIH) is that consumers should not respond to predictable changes in their income. 1 To test this hypothesis, a number of recent papers have exploited natural experiments to identify anticipated income changes. 2 In particular, recent work by Parker (1999) uses the change in after-tax income due to the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax, and a related paper by Souleles (1999) examines the response of consumption to income tax refunds. Surprisingly, Parker and Souleles find that even when income is expected to change within the year, expenditure is excessively sensitive to the timing of the income change. While their results can be interpreted as evidence that our canonical model of consumption is inadequate, an alternative explanation is that the anticipated income changes they exploit are small and irregular, and that …