We analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey … (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly … saving motive of European households when the proportion of households saving for each motive is used as the criterion to …

For a firm that cannot raise external funds, cash on hand serves as precautionary saving. We derive a closed …

The saving patterns of retired U.S. households pose a challenge to the basic life-cycle model of saving. The observed … these precautionary saving motives from other motives, such as the desire to leave bequests. An important complementary …

We employ a model of precautionary saving to study why household saving rates are so high in China and so low in the US …. The use of recursive preferences gives a convenient decomposition of saving into precautionary and non precautionary … components. This decomposition indicates that over 80 percent of China's saving rate and nearly all of the US saving arises from …