We use China's large-scale reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify and quantify the importance of precautionary saving for wealth accumulation. Before the reform, SOE workers enjoyed the same job security as government employees. Since the...

We use China’s large-scale reform of state-owned enterprises (SOE) in the late 1990s as a natural experiment to identify and quantify the importance of precautionary savings for wealth accumulation. Before the reform, SOE workers enjoyed the same job security as government employees. After the...

We study, both empirically and quantitatively, the role of savings and the labor supply in self-insurance channels over the life cycle when one faces not only idiosyncratic income risks, but also changes in longevity risk and pension benefits. We pick China as a case study since China has...

Wage inequality between education groups in the United States has increased substantially since the early 1980s. The relative quantity of college-educated workers has also increased dramatically in the postwar period. This paper presents a unified framework where the dynamics of both skill...

We study, both empirically and quantitatively, the role of savings and the labor supply inself-insurance channels over the life cycle when one faces not only idiosyncratic income risks, but also changes in longevity risk and pension benefits. We pick China as a case study since China has...

"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. A positive correlation between insurance coverage and ex post risk can be an indicator for private information in insurance markets....