We decompose the household saving rate into precautionary and non-precautionary components. When applied to Chinese households, who save 30% of disposable income, the precautionary motive accounts for two-thirds of that saving rate. For some admissible parameter values, the saving rate increases...

The 1997-1998 Asian crisis countries experienced drastic collapses of macroeconomic aggregates followed by highly persistent underperformance of economies relative to their pre-crises periods. In this paper, we develop a small open economy model with heterogeneous producers which can explain the...