With 20 years of PSID data, we document persistent racial differentials in life-cycle consumption dynamics. Starting from similar positions in the consumption distribution Blacks end up in lower percentiles than Whites. Education, income, and wealth are three key drivers of these different...

We quantify the commute time savings associated with work from home, drawing on data for 27 countries. The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. We estimate that work from home saved about two hours per week per worker in 2021 and 2022, and that it will...

We study optimal tax design based on the idea that policy-makers face trade-offs between multiple margins of redistribution. Within a Mirrleesian economy with earnings, consumption and retirement savings, we derive a novel formula for optimal income and savings distortions based on...

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers' retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers' retirement income goals. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on...

This study aims to assess the role of culture as a determinant of financial inclusion, defined with respect to formal account ownership, saving and credit in/from formal financial institutions. A sample of 85 countries, comprising 50 developing and 35 developed countries from the World Bank’s...

Revisions to the U.S. personal saving rate are very large and may be predictable. We decompose the revisions of the personal saving rate into those caused by revisions to income and those caused by revisions to household outlays. We use our findings to explore the forecastability of future...

Do sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) contribute to Africa's development? This paper assesses the objectives of SWFs (fiscal stabilization, productive investment, intergenerational saving) and discusses alternatives. We argue that fiscal stabilization funds are often necessary, but entail...

The tax system treats funds that remain in a pension at death extremely favourably. Where an individual dies before age 75, funds remaining in their pension escape income tax entirely - there was income tax relief when the money was paid into the pension and no income tax when the money is taken...

Retired households, especially those with high lifetime income, decumulate their wealth very slowly, and many die leaving large estates. The three leading explanations for the "retirement savings puzzle" are the desire to insure against uncertain lifespans and medical expenses, the desire to...

We study how individual unemployment expectations are shaped and updated using a unique longitudinal survey data set with subjective unemployment expectations. The survey data is linked with third-party reported administrative data on unemployment realizations, such that we are able to examine...

We quantify how banks' funding costs affect their lending behavior directly, and indirectly by feeding back to their net worth. For identification, we exploit banks' heterogeneous liability structure and the existence of regulated deposits in France whose rates are set by the government. Using...

In COVID-19 times, the healthcare system needs more financial and other resources for covering all necessary medical products and services. On the other hand, we have observed pressure on the effectiveness and optimisation of resources in hospitals and healthcare facilities. Digitalisation...

We quantify the effect of mask mandates in the United States. Our regression discontinuity design exploits county-level variation in COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions, and deaths across the border between states with and without mandates. We find a significant and substantial effect—mask...

There has been a large rise in savings by Americans in the top 1% of the income or wealth distribution over the past 40 years, which we call the saving glut of the rich. Instead of financing investment, this saving glut has been associated with dissaving by the non-rich and dissaving by the...

Domestic savings is a vital source of investment funds, especially for developing economies. It is thus essentialthat internal savings capacity in these economies is increased to enhance investment financing and economicgrowth. Since increased reliance on external capital flows can result in...

Private consumption, i.e., spending of households, is a key economic variable. While data on private consumption are widely available on a national, aggregate level, disaggregated data on household spending are scarce, particularly in the form of a panel. To fill this gap, we make use of Swiss...

This paper revisits trade theory under the Gossenian theme that consumption takes time. Weshow how the substitutability between time-intensive household-produced consumption goodsand time-saving commercially produced consumption goods (which save households’consumption and production time)...

Using a dataset containing information for more than 39 million contracts and a quasi-experimental design provided by national matching contribution policy reform in Turkey, we study the effects of matching contributions on saving outcomes and determine heterogeneities in responses to matching...

This paper investigates the impact of public employment on household saving rates in China using representative household-level data. After controlling for a series of variables such as income, risk attitude, financial literacy, and demographic factors, we show that households headed by public...

Purpose This study examines the comparative link between mobile money and entrepreneurship in East Africa. Apart from analysing our data to examine locational, gender and age heterogeneities in the mobile money-entrepreneurship nexus, we explore the potential roles of digital savings and access...

This paper argues that the 40-year-old Feldstein-Horioka “puzzle” (i.e., that in a regression of the domestic investment rate on the domestic saving rate, the estimated coefficient is significantly larger than what would be expected in a world characterized by high capital mobility) should...

Deciding how much to save for retirement can be complicated. Drawing on a field experiment conducted with the Department of Defense, we study whether such complexity depresses participation in an employer-sponsored retirement saving plan. We find that simplifying one dimension of the enrollment...

This paper contributes to the literature on the effects of uncertainty on household saving – a long-standing and extensively explored topic yet leaving a number of issues inconclusive. It concentrates on the labor income uncertainty by addressing saving against unemployment risk in terms of...

This article empirically investigates the drives for participation inJamey'ah (literally, Society) in Egypt as types of Rotating Savings andCredit Associations (ROSCAs) that agree in their general frameworkwith Islamic principles. The article also evaluates the sample’sexperience in order to...

This paper proposes a framework of voluntary savings schemes (VSS) in Jordan that can complement the current formal sector arrangements to better protect informal workers against economic shocks, unemployment, old age, or disability. As benefits of traditional mandatory pension systems worldwide...

This report is based on a study of the costs of retail payments in Kosovo, using a methodology (A Practical Guide for Measuring Retail Payment Costs) developed by the World Bank's Payment System Development Group (PSDG), part of the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice. The...

We estimate the spatial spillover effects of a program to promote savings groups in Uganda and Malawi. We use geolocation data from a cluster-randomized experiment to compare the outcomes of households in areas where a high proportion of nearby villages were randomly assigned to treatment to...

A comparison of the performances of pension products that ignores long-term trends might significantly overestimate the long-term impact of volatility risks while underestimating the impact of persistent, low frequency trends. This paper proposes a comparison making use of projection models...

This paper examines the relationship between planning for overseas education and household saving behaviour in China for a sample of household drawn from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) covering 2011, 2013 and 2015. Household saving behaviour is captured by the amount of household...

This paper is about the comparison of the cycle of money including the enforcement savings and without them. Thus, it is plausible to extract the appropriate conclusions about the utility of savings in an economy when there the savings return to the market for investments and for consumption and...

We show that expansionary monetary policy is associated with higher household portfolio allocation to high risk assets and lower allocation to low risk assets, in line with “reaching for yield” behaviour. Our main findings are based on analysis of US household level panel data using...

Economists have advanced several psychological frictions to explain why many 401(k)-eligible employees undersave for retirement despite generous matching incentives. We provide evidence on four of these frictions through a field experiment randomizing undersaving employees to information- and...

In light of the severity of the health crisis in Ukraine due to the russian aggression, the Ukrainian government must urgently implement expeditious solutions to increase the supply of essential medicines and medical products. One such measure is to exploit all existing domestic manufacturing...

This paper is the first to non-experimentally establish a causal relationship between households’ mortality beliefs and subsequent savings and consumption decisions. Motivated by prior literature on the effect of personal experiences on individual’s expectation formation, I exploit the death...

We study the response of residential water demand to nonlinear prices by exploiting a natural experiment arising from a water pricing reform in a major Chinese city. The reform introduced an unconventional Increasing Block Tariff featuring prices set according to annual cumulative consumption...

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers' retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers' retirement income goal. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on...

We explore the forces that drive cash savings in equity issuance using the average cash-savings rate instead of the marginal cash-savings rate that overstates individual issuers’ cash savings. Equity issuers with high investment opportunities save more cash in anticipation of greater cash...

Borrowing for education has increased rapidly in the past several decades, such that the majority of non-housing debt on US households’ balance sheets is now student loan debt. This paper analyzes the implications of student loan borrowing for later-life economic well-being, with a focus on...

This paper documents changes in retirement saving patterns at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a large panel of US tax data, including tens of millions of person-year observations, and measure retirement savings contributions and withdrawals. We use these data to document several...

Cooperatives are considered to have provided benefits and advantages for the community who are members of the cooperative especially, both households, community groups and business actors. However, with the development of the world economy, the existence of cooperatives is now considered to be...