Due to the high uncertainty characterizing them, transition economies provide an extraordinary opportunity to test the precautionary saving hypothesis. This paper represents an attempt to exploit this opportunity. We use a panel of 2,346 Muscovite households, over the 12 months of 1996, to construct two time-varying measures of consumption growth variability, which we use as proxies for households' perceived uncertainty. We then regress household saving on these uncertainty variables using a GMM-system estimator. We find that both uncertainty measures generally have a positive and statistically significant effect on saving. This result, which is robust to the use of different measures of saving, supports the precautionary saving hypothesis. Copyright 2003 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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