This article estimates marginal propensities to consume (MPC) out of current and lagged income for U.S. states using panel data regressions that control for time-specific and state-level fixed effects. The MPCs vary across states, in particular, the MPC out of current income is higher in states...

We examine optimal saving in the presence of two small risks: income risk and a background risk. First, we compute the necessary and sufficient condition for a positive precautionary saving, showing that it depends on two terms capturing respectively the direct effect of income risk and the...

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey for the years 1996 to 2000 to investigate whether individuals in the UK save for precautionary motives against uncertain medical costs. In particular, we test the hypothesis that those individuals who are not covered by private medical...

In this paper, we develop a measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per person in retirement. We use this measure, which we call "annualized comprehensive wealth," to investigate spend-down...

Precautionary saving has engendered much interest, both because of the possibility that it can explain why, contrary to the basic Lifecycle/Permanent-Income Hypothesis, consumption roughly tracks income over the lifecycle and because of speculation that precautionary saving might account for a...

This paper shows how, under a few standard assumptions on the utility function, the monotonicity of absolute risk aversion (ARA) and of absolute prudence (AP) are connected. We get some general Propositions on the behaviour of the two functions regarding the positions and the number of their...

For the first time, this paper uses a panel data set, the British Household Panel Survey, to analyse saving behaviour in Britain. One objective is to test the precautionary saving hypothesis, according to which households save to self-insure against uncertainty. Our results show that in...

This paper investigates if labour income uncertainty, particularly as related to the development and diffusion of fixed and short-term work contracts, may have played a role in determining the recent decline of the marginal propensity to consume of Italian households. We analyse this issue in...

How does risk affect saving? Empirical work typically examines the effects of detectible differences in risk within the data. How these differences affect saving in theoretical models depends on the metric one uses for risk. For labor-income risk, second-degree increases in risk require prudence...