[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/8107.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Empirical Importance of Precautionary Saving

Author

Listed:
  • Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas
  • Jonathan A. Parker
Abstract
One of the basic motives for saving is the accumulation of wealth to insure future welfare. Both introspection and extant research on consumption insurance find that people face substantial risks that they do not fairly pool. In theory, the consumption and wealth accumulation of price-taking households in an economy with incomplete markets differs substantially from the behavior of these same households in the equivalent economy with complete-markets. The question we address in this article is whether we find this difference to be large in practice. What is the empirical importance of precautionary saving? We provide a simple decomposition that characterizes the importance of precautionary saving in the U.S. economy. We use this decomposition as an organizing framework to present four main findings: (a) the concavity of the consumption policy rule, (b) the importance of precautionary saving for life-cycle saving and wealth accumulation, (c) the contribution of changes in risk to fluctuations in aggregate consumption and (d) the significant impact of incomplete markets on aggregate fluctuations in calibrated general equilibrium models. We conclude with directions for future research.

Suggested Citation

  • Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas & Jonathan A. Parker, 2001. "The Empirical Importance of Precautionary Saving," NBER Working Papers 8107, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8107
    Note: EFG
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w8107.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Constantinides, George M & Duffie, Darrell, 1996. "Asset Pricing with Heterogeneous Consumers," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 104(2), pages 219-240, April.
    2. Kjetil Storesletten & Chris Telmer & Amir Yaron, 2007. "Asset Pricing with Idiosyncratic Risk and Overlapping Generations," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 10(4), pages 519-548, October.
    3. Deaton, Angus, 1991. "Saving and Liquidity Constraints," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(5), pages 1221-1248, September.
    4. Stephen P. Zeldes, 1989. "Optimal Consumption with Stochastic Income: Deviations from Certainty Equivalence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 104(2), pages 275-298.
    5. Carroll, Christopher D & Kimball, Miles S, 1996. "On the Concavity of the Consumption Function," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(4), pages 981-992, July.
    6. Jonathan A. Parker & Bruce Preston, 2005. "Precautionary Saving and Consumption Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1119-1143, September.
    7. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas & Jonathan A. Parker, 2002. "Consumption Over the Life Cycle," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(1), pages 47-89, January.
    8. Christopher D. Carroll, 1997. "Buffer-Stock Saving and the Life Cycle/Permanent Income Hypothesis," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(1), pages 1-55.
    9. Per Krusell & Anthony A. Smith & Jr., 1998. "Income and Wealth Heterogeneity in the Macroeconomy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(5), pages 867-896, October.
    10. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, 2000. "Precautionary Savings, LifeCycle and Macroeconomics," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 0793, Econometric Society.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jonathan A. Parker & Bruce Preston, 2005. "Precautionary Saving and Consumption Fluctuations," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1119-1143, September.
    2. Chipeniuk, Karsten O. & Katz, Nets Hawk & Walker, Todd B., 2022. "Households, auctioneers, and aggregation," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    3. Scott L. Fulford, 2020. "Demand for emergency savings is higher for low-income households, but so is the cost of shocks," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 58(6), pages 3007-3033, June.
    4. James Feigenbaum, 2005. "Heterogeneity vs Uncertainty in Anticipation of a Borrowing Constraint," Working Paper 230, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Jan 2005.
    5. Harmenberg, Karl, 2021. "Aggregating heterogeneous-agent models with permanent income shocks," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 129(C).
    6. Karsten O. Chipeniuk & Nets Hawk Katz & Todd Bruce Walker, 2022. "Households, Auctioneers, and Aggregation," CAEPR Working Papers 2022-005 Classification-E, Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research, Department of Economics, Indiana University Bloomington.
    7. Wang, Neng, 2007. "An equilibrium model of wealth distribution," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(7), pages 1882-1904, October.
    8. Wang, Neng, 2006. "Generalizing the permanent-income hypothesis: Revisiting Friedman's conjecture on consumption," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(4), pages 737-752, May.
    9. Christopher D. Carroll, 2000. "Requiem for the Representative Consumer? Aggregate Implications of Microeconomic Consumption Behavior," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(2), pages 110-115, May.
    10. Tom Krebs & Pravin Krishna & William Maloney, 2010. "Trade Policy, Income Risk, and Welfare," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(3), pages 467-481, August.
    11. Monika Piazzesi & Martin Schneider, 2009. "Inflation and the price of real assets," Staff Report 423, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    12. John Y. Campbell & João F. Cocco, 2003. "Household Risk Management and Optimal Mortgage Choice," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(4), pages 1449-1494.
    13. Piazzesi, Monika & Leombroni, Matteo & Rogers, Ciaran & Schneider, Martin, 2020. "Inflation and the Price of Real Assets," CEPR Discussion Papers 14390, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. Markus K. Brunnermeier & Thomas M. Eisenbach & Yuliy Sannikov, 2012. "Macroeconomics with Financial Frictions: A Survey," Levine's Working Paper Archive 786969000000000384, David K. Levine.
    15. Richard M. H. Suen, 2011. "Concave Consumption Function and Precautionary Wealth Accumulation," Working papers 2011-23, University of Connecticut, Department of Economics.
    16. Allen, Todd W. & Carroll, Christopher D., 2001. "Individual Learning About Consumption," Macroeconomic Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(02), pages 255-271, April.
    17. Sattinger, Michael, 2011. "The Markov consumption problem," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(4-5), pages 409-416.
    18. Jonathan Heathcote & Kjetil Storesletten & Giovanni L. Violante, 2009. "Quantitative Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Households," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 319-354, May.
    19. Fulford, Scott L., 2015. "The surprisingly low importance of income uncertainty for precaution," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 79(C), pages 151-171.
    20. Luis M. Viceira, 2001. "Optimal Portfolio Choice for Long‐Horizon Investors with Nontradable Labor Income," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(2), pages 433-470, April.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8107. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.