Summary Saving decisions are complex, since there are many concurrent motives for saving a portion of one’s income. However, while the existing literature covers all of these motives, most contributions select only one of them as a focus and relegate the others to the background by making...

This paper investigates the savings behaviour of German households, especially their capability and their reasons to save. We find that about one third of private households do not save at all while about 50 percent of the households save very regularly. Savings rates appear to be related to...