Institutional Change In The Urban Consumer Behavior Research

China has made great achievement in the past 30 years of reform, people's living standard has been greatly improved at the same time. The income of urban residents has substantially increased and the Engel coefficient dropped. However, abnormal phenomenon emerged in consumption area:the rate of investment is overly high and the rate of aggregate consumption is overly low, besides, the average propensity of consumers continually decreased.On the background of china's economic restructuring, with the combination of theoretical and practical analysis methods, the paper analyzed the evolving process of urban residents'consumption behavior, probed into the insufficiency of the consumption demand in terms of uncertainty, liquidity constraints and the expansion of income gaps.First of all, based on a comprehensive narration to related foreign and domestic research, the paper makes general analysis of the factors affecting the consumption behavior, and describes the changes of disposable income, consumption expenditure and consumption structure; secondly, the paper analyzes the evolving process of the outer environment of consumption and the consumption behavior of urban residents. From the second chapter, the paper begins to make practical analysis about the influence of uncertainty, liquidity constraint and income gaps to urban residents' consumption behavior:1. set up ECM(error correction model)based on CARA function(Constant Absolute Risk Aversion), analyzes the influence of income uncertainty, expenditure uncertainty to consumption behavior during different periods of the reform; 2.measures the influence of liquidity constraint to consumption behavior using Jappelli's liquidity estimation model; 3. analyzes the influence of income gap to urban residents'consumption propensity.The paper found that the institutional reform started since 1978 has a great impact on the urban residents'consumption behavior in many ways. The uncertainty, liquidity constraints and income gap confronted by urban residents obviously affect the consumption behavior of urban residents. Based on the researches, the paper also puts forward corresponding policy recommendations.