Do the Rich Save More in Japan? Evidence Based on Two Micro Datasets for the 2000s

Masahiro Hori, Koichiro Iwamoto, Takeshi Niizeki and Fumihiko Suga

ESRI Discussion paper series from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)

Abstract: Using two household surveys for Japan, the Family and Lifestyle Survey (FLS) and the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), this paper investigates whether the saving rates of richer households (households with higher lifetime wealth) are higher than those of poorer households. The major difficulty in addressing this issue empirically is that a reliable proxy for lifetime wealth is rarely available. We therefore construct a number of proxies from the two surveys. While the estimated relationships are sensitive to the choice of proxy for lifetime wealth, the patterns observed for working age households in Japan are generally consistent with those reported for Western countries: we find significant positive correlations between saving rates and lifetime wealth when we use education and/or the type of occupation (job) as proxies, while the positive correlations disappear when we use consumption as an alternative proxy. We also try alternative proxies original to this study: lagged consumption, household assets, and/or purchase prices and find that the results with these instruments indicate marginally positive correlations between saving rates and lifetime wealth for working age households. We further find that the relationship between saving rates and lifetime wealth differs depending on the life stage of individual households. Older households with higher lifetime wealth appear to be dissaving to some extent, which is more or less consistent with the lifecycle model of consumption.

Keywords: saving rates; lifetime/permanent income; Japan JEL classifications: D12; D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.esri.go.jp/jp/archive/e_dis/e_dis322/e_dis322.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.esri.go.jp:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Do the Rich Save More in Japan? Evidence Based on two Micro Data Sets for the 2000s (2016)
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:esj:esridp:322

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ESRI Discussion paper series from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by HORI nobuko ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).