Risk and Precautionary Saving in Two-Person Households

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Apps, Patricia; Andrienko, Yuri; Rees, Ray
• 署名单位: University of Sydney; University of Munich
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.104.3.1040
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 1040-1046
• 关键词: increasing risk; BEHAVIOR

摘要

The existing literature on precautionary saving is based almost entirely on the assumption that the household acts as if it consisted of a single individual decision-taker. In reality saving decisions are typically taken by two-person households. This paper examines the implications of this observation for the existence of precautionary saving, and shows that the assumption that the individual utility functions satisfy the conditions for precautionary saving to exist can imply that the household exhibits precautionary saving, but only under strong assumptions on the type of risk change being considered.