¹⁷For the six countries for which nondurables and services data are readily available, regression results using total PCE are similar to those reported in the paper for nondurables and services. Since durable consumption growth is generally mildly negatively autocorrelated (Mankiw (1982)), the estimates of consumption persistence for the other countries for which we use data on the total PCE (see the bottom panel of table 1) may be biased downward, making our evidence in favor of strong consumption stickiness likely to be conservative. For the U.S., it is possible to perform similar estimations using data on purely nondurable goods spending and on retail sales spending, with results similar to those reported here for PCE excluding durables. Japan is not included in our sample for reasons explained in Appendix A.