Household Savings in Russia during the Transition

Mark C. Foley and William Pyle

Middlebury College Working Paper Series from Middlebury College, Department of Economics

Abstract: We exploit panel data from the second phase of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to investigate the household characteristics that explain saving during a period of extreme dislocation. Among our more noteworthy findings, we find evidence of short-term consumption smoothing behavior as households respond to temporary income shocks. Conditional on income level, we find that savings rates are higher in households benefiting from non-standard (likely transitory) sources of support such as private transfers and sales of home produced food; savings rates are lower, moreover, in households suffering from unemployment or payment arrears. We also confirm the robustness of an atypical U-shaped age-savings relationship to multivariate specifications. And finally, we turn up strong support for an inverse relationship between the household’s stock of durables and its saving rate.

JEL-codes: D91 P20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mdl:mdlpap:0522

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