The Cultural Origin of Saving Behavior

Joan Costa-Font, Paola Giuliano and Berkay Özcan ()

No 12987, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. A seminal paper in economics (1) however did not find any effect of culture on savings. We revisit this evidence using a novel dataset, which allows us to study the saving behavior of up to three generations of immigrants in the United Kingdom. Against the backdrop of existing evidence, we find that cultural preferences are an important explanation for cross-country differences in saving behavior, and their relevance persists up to three generations.

Keywords: culture; saving (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D0 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2020-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-evo, nep-fdg, nep-gro, nep-ltv and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: PLoS ONE , 2019, 13 (9), e0202290

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https://docs.iza.org/dp12987.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Cultural Origin of Saving Behavior (2020)
Journal Article: The cultural origin of saving behavior (2018)
Working Paper: The cultural origin of saving behavior (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12987

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