Precautionary Saving of Chinese and U.S. Households

Horag Choi, Steven Lugauer and Nelson Mark

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2017, vol. 49, issue 4, 635-661

Abstract: We employ a model of precautionary saving to study why household saving rates are high in China and low in the United States. The use of recursive preferences gives a convenient decomposition of saving into precautionary and nonprecautionary components. Over 80% of China's saving rate and nearly all U.S. saving arises from the precautionary motive. The difference between U.S. and Chinese household income growth rates is vastly more important than income risk for explaining the saving rates. The key mechanism is that precautionary savers have target wealth‐to‐income ratios, and rapid income growth necessitates high saving rates to maintain the ratio.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jmcb.12393

Related works:
Working Paper: Precautionary Saving of Chinese and U.S. Households (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:jmoncb:v:49:y:2017:i:4:p:635-661

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Money, Credit and Banking is currently edited by Robert deYoung, Paul Evans, Pok-Sang Lam and Kenneth D. West

More articles in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking from Blackwell Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().