IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-11-00592.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Economic Shocks and Savings Behavior by the Rural Poor

Author

Listed:
  • Julia Paxton

    (Ohio University)

  • Fan Zhuo

    (Boston University)

Abstract

Using data from 587 marginalized cooperative member households in rural Mexico, this paper examines how household formal financial savings fluctuates with economic shocks and other relevant variables. Regression results show that negative shocks, income, wealth, formal credit, distance from a bank branch, percent of non-working members in a household, and education have a significant influence on formal financial savings. Results from quantile regression show that the impact of negative shocks on formal savings is only statistically significant in households with a high propensity to save. These precautionary savings households not only save more, but are inclined to withdraw savings to alleviate potentially adverse personal income trends associated with the shocks.

Suggested Citation

  • Julia Paxton & Fan Zhuo, 2011. "Economic Shocks and Savings Behavior by the Rural Poor," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 31(4), pages 3286-3293.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-11-00592
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2011/Volume31/EB-11-V31-I4-P299.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lee, Jeong-Joon & Sawada, Yasuyuki, 2010. "Precautionary saving under liquidity constraints: Evidence from rural Pakistan," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(1), pages 77-86, January.
    2. Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas & Jonathan A. Parker, 2002. "Consumption Over the Life Cycle," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(1), pages 47-89, January.
    3. Paxson, Christina H, 1992. "Using Weather Variability to Estimate the Response of Savings to Transitory Income in Thailand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(1), pages 15-33, March.
    4. George-Marios Angeletos, 2001. "The Hyberbolic Consumption Model: Calibration, Simulation, and Empirical Evaluation," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(3), pages 47-68, Summer.
    5. Skinner, Jonathan, 1988. "Risky income, life cycle consumption, and precautionary savings," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 237-255, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marcela Ibanez & Sebastian O. Schneider, 2023. "Income Risk, Precautionary Saving, and Loss Aversion – An Empirical Test," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2023_06, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    2. Marcela Ibanez & Sebastian O. Schneider, 2021. "Income Risk, Precautionary Saving, and Loss Aversion – An Empirical Test," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2021_06, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    3. Robert Lensink & Roselia Servin & Marrit Berg, 2017. "Do Savings and Credit Institutions Reduce Vulnerability? New Evidence From Mexico," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 63(2), pages 335-352, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Paxton, Julia & Young, Lauren, 2011. "Liquidity Profiles of Poor Mexican Households," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 600-610, April.
    2. Jin, Ling & Chen, Kevin Z. & Yu, Bingxin & Huang, Zuhui, 2011. "How prudent are rural households in developing transition economies:," IFPRI discussion papers 1127, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    3. Alexander L. Brown & Zhikang Eric Chua & Colin F. Camerer, 2009. "Learning and Visceral Temptation in Dynamic Saving Experiments," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(1), pages 197-231.
    4. Groneck, Max & Ludwig, Alexander & Zimper, Alexander, 2016. "A life-cycle model with ambiguous survival beliefs," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 137-180.
    5. Shapiro, Jesse M., 2005. "Is there a daily discount rate? Evidence from the food stamp nutrition cycle," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(2-3), pages 303-325, February.
    6. Alessandro Federici & Pierluigi Montalbano, 2012. "Macroeconomic volatility, consumption behaviour and welfare: A cross-country analysis," Working Paper Series 3612, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    7. Yulei Luo & William T. Smith & Heng-fu Zou, 2009. "The Spirit of Capitalism and Excess Smoothness," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 10(2), pages 281-301, November.
    8. Francisco Gomes & Michael Haliassos & Tarun Ramadorai, 2021. "Household Finance," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 59(3), pages 919-1000, September.
    9. Meghir, Costas & Pistaferri, Luigi, 2011. "Earnings, Consumption and Life Cycle Choices," Handbook of Labor Economics, in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 9, pages 773-854, Elsevier.
    10. Emiliano Magrini & Pierluigi Montalbano, 2012. "Trade openness and vulnerability to poverty: Vietnam in the long-run (1992-2008)," Working Paper Series 3512, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    11. Briggs, Joseph & Cesarini, David & Lindqvist, Erik & Östling, Robert, 2021. "Windfall gains and stock market participation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 139(1), pages 57-83.
    12. Bagchi, Shantanu, 2015. "Labor supply and the optimality of Social Security," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 167-185.
    13. Ashoka Mody & Franziska Ohnsorge & Damiano Sandri, 2012. "Precautionary Savings in the Great Recession," IMF Economic Review, Palgrave Macmillan;International Monetary Fund, vol. 60(1), pages 114-138, April.
    14. Heinzel Christoph & Richard Peter, 2021. "Precautionary motives with multiple instruments," Working Papers SMART 21-09, INRAE UMR SMART.
    15. Annamaria Lusardi & Pierre-Carl Michaud & Olivia S. Mitchell, 2017. "Optimal Financial Knowledge and Wealth Inequality," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 125(2), pages 431-477.
    16. Marcos José Pérez Monteiro & Pedro Cavalcante Ferreira & Leandro Radusweski Quintal, 2014. "The Latin American Saving Gap," Anais do XL Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 40th Brazilian Economics Meeting] 036, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    17. Feigenbaum James A. & Li Geng, 2012. "Life Cycle Dynamics of Income Uncertainty and Consumption," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 12(1), pages 1-49, May.
    18. Chen, Kevin & Meilke, Karl & Turvey, Calum, 1996. "Theory of Prudent Farm Households and Agricultural Insurance," Working Papers 244799, University of Guelph, Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics.
    19. Arthur Kennickell & Annamaria Lusardi, 2004. "Disentangling the Importance of the Precautionary Saving Mode," NBER Working Papers 10888, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Aaberge, Rolf & Liu, Kai & Zhu, Yu, 2017. "Political uncertainty and household savings," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 154-170.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Mexico; precautionary savings; quantile regression;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development
    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-11-00592. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.