We argue that the US personal saving rate's long stability (1960s-1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s-2007), and … of labor income uncertainty and credit constraints. Saving in the model is affected by the gap between target and actual … suggests that increased credit availability accounts for most of the long-term saving decline, while fluctuations in wealth and …

The standard approach to modelling consumption/saving problems is to assume that the decisionmaker is solving a dynamic … stochastic optimization problem However under realistic descriptions of utility and uncertainty the optimal consumption/saving …

We argue that the US personal saving rate's long stability (1960s-1980s), subsequent steady decline (1980s-2007), and … of labor income uncertainty and credit constraints. Saving in the model is affected by the gap between target and actual … suggests that increased credit availability accounts for most of the long-term saving decline, while fluctuations in wealth and …

Economists working with numerical solutions to the optimal consumption/saving problem under uncertainty have long known … that there are quantitatively important interactions between liquidity constraints and precautionary saving behavior. This … increases the precautionary saving motive around levels of wealth where the constraint becomes binding. Second, we provide a …

effects of precautionary saving and liquidity constraints are often virtually indistinguishable …

target, temporarily boosting saving …

Because efforts to explain international saving differentials using traditional economic variables have not been very … successful (Bosworth, 1993), some economists have proposed that national saving differences reflect cultural differences. We … attempt to test that hypothesis by using data from the US Census to examine whether immigrants to the US from high-saving …

income ( the rich') have higher lifetime saving rates (Dynan, Skinner, and Zeldes (1996); Lillard and Karoly (1997)). The … paper argues that the saving behavior of the richest households cannot be explained by models in which the only purpose of …