This paper investigates whether families save partially to self-insure against uncertain future earnings and estimates the extent to which pooled insurance substitutes for saving as a precaution against earnings risk. An econometric model is estimated using unique household survey data from the...

This paper examines whether the saving decisions among a large, unique sample of working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century are consistent with consumption smoothing tendencies in the spirit of the permanent income hypothesis. We develop an econometric model to...