Savings and Saving Rates: Up or Down?

Guillermo Ordonez and Facundo Piguillem

No 27179, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: It depends what we want to measure. Most literature has focused on observed flow of savings (per-period savings as fraction of GDP), which has declined persistently since 1980. Even though this decline means that fewer funds are available for investment in each period, it does not follow that the households’ actual savings (underlying, not observed, savings determined by dynamic optimization) also go down. We theoretically link these two concepts, discuss the conditions under which they move in opposite directions, and show that indeed the actual savings has sharply increased since 1980.

JEL-codes: E01 E21 G51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: AP EFG
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