IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this paper

Frugality; Are We Fretting Too Much? Household Saving and Assets in the United States

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Evan C Tanner
  • Yasser Abdih

Abstract

Household savings rates in the United States have recently crept up from all-time lows. Some have suggested that a shift toward frugality will hamper GDP growth-the Keynesian "paradox of thrift." We estimate that households compensate for a fall in their asset income by saving more out of their labor income, dollar-for-dollar. In the wake of the crisis, our model predicts that such primary savings will increase, but only temporarily and modestly, as household assets stabilize. As savings flows gradually accumulate, they help rebuild corporate net worth and hence firms' capacity to make capital investments. A timely return to pre-crisis levels of capital investment would require that U.S. households save substantially more than the model predicts, starting now. Hence, we should fret that our savings rates may be too low.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=23259
Download Restriction: no

Paper provided by International Monetary Fund in its series IMF Working Papers with number 09/197.

as
in new window

Length: 51
Date of creation: 01 Sep 2009
Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:09/197
Contact details of provider: Postal:
International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC USA

Phone: (202) 623-7000
Fax: (202) 623-4661
Web page: http://www.imf.org/external/pubind.htm
Email:


More information through EDIRC

Order Information: Web: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/pubs/ord_info.htm

Keywords: Economic models; Financial crisis; Asset prices; Private savings; Private investment; Private sector; Income; Household credit; Investment; Time series; United States; Saving; net worth; cointegration; transversality; paradox of thrift; equation; labor income; statistic; disposable income; consumer durables;

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:

as
in new window


  1. Ahmed, Shaghil & Rogers, John H., 1995. "Government budget deficits and trade deficits Are present value constraints satisfied in long-term data?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 351-374, November.
  2. Stewart C. Myers & Nicholas S. Majluf, 1984. "Corporate Financing and Investment Decisions When Firms Have InformationThat Investors Do Not Have," NBER Working Papers 1396, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  3. Myers, Stewart C. & Majluf, Nicholas S., 1984. "Corporate financing and investment decisions when firms have information that investors do not have," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 187-221, June.
  4. Martin Lettau & Sydney C. Ludvigson, 2004. "Understanding Trend and Cycle in Asset Values: Reevaluating the Wealth Effect on Consumption," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(1), pages 276-299, March.
  5. Corsetti, Giancarlo & Roubini, Nouriel, 1991. "Fiscal deficits, public debt, and government solvency: Evidence from OECD countries," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 354-380, December.
  6. Eugene F. Fama, 2002. "Testing Trade-Off and Pecking Order Predictions About Dividends and Debt," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 15(1), pages 1-33, March.
  7. Johansen, Soren & Juselius, Katarina, 1990. "Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Inference on Cointegration--With Applications to the Demand for Money," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 52(2), pages 169-210, May.
  8. E. Telatar & N. Bolatoglu & F. Telatar, 2004. "A new approach on testing the behaviour of the governments towards sustainability of fiscal policy in a small-open and politically instable economy," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(5), pages 333-336.
  9. Bernanke, Ben S. & Gertler, Mark & Gilchrist, Simon, 1999. "The financial accelerator in a quantitative business cycle framework," Handbook of Macroeconomics,in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 21, pages 1341-1393 Elsevier.
  10. Feldstein, Martin & Horioka, Charles, 1980. "Domestic Saving and International Capital Flows," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 90(358), pages 314-329, June.
  11. Trehan, Bharat & Walsh, Carl E, 1991. "Testing Intertemporal Budget Constraints: Theory and Applications to U.S. Federal Budget and Current Account Deficits," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 23(2), pages 206-223, May.
  12. Steven M. Fazzari & R. Glenn Hubbard & BRUCE C. PETERSEN, 1988. "Financing Constraints and Corporate Investment," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 19(1), pages 141-206.
  13. Evan Tanner, 1997. "Shifts in US savings: long-run asset accumulation versus consumption smoothing," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 29(8), pages 989-999.
  14. Jeremy Rudd & Karl Whelan, 2006. "Empirical Proxies for the Consumption-Wealth Ratio," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 9(1), pages 34-51, January.
  15. Myers, Stewart C. & Majluf, Nicolás S., 1945-, 1984. "Corporate financing and investment decisions when firms have information that investors do not have," Working papers 1523-84., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
  16. Engle, Robert & Granger, Clive, 2015. "Co-integration and error correction: Representation, estimation, and testing," Applied Econometrics, Publishing House "SINERGIA PRESS", vol. 39(3), pages 106-135.
  17. Hakkio, Craig S & Rush, Mark, 1991. "Is the Budget Deficit "Too Large?"," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 29(3), pages 429-445, July.
  18. Trehan, Bharat & Walsh, Carl E., 1990. "Seigniorage and tax smoothing in the United States 1914-1986," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 97-112, January.
  19. Tanner, Evan, 1995. "Intertemporal solvency and indexed debt: evidence from Brazil, 1976-1991," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 14(4), pages 549-573, August.
  20. Quintos, Carmela E, 1995. "Sustainability of the Deficit Process with Structural Shifts," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 13(4), pages 409-417, October.
  21. Svensson, Lars E O & Razin, Assaf, 1983. "The Terms of Trade and the Current Account: The Harberger-Laursen-Metzler Effect," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 91(1), pages 97-125, February.
  22. Johansen, Soren, 1988. "Statistical analysis of cointegration vectors," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 12(2-3), pages 231-254.
  23. Jushan Bai & Robin L. Lumsdaine & James H. Stock, 1998. "Testing For and Dating Common Breaks in Multivariate Time Series," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 65(3), pages 395-432.
  24. Tanner, Evan & Liu, Peter, 1994. "Is the Budget Deficit "Too Large"?: Some Further Evidence," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 32(3), pages 511-518, July.
  25. Steven N. Kaplan & Luigi Zingales, 1997. "Do Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivities Provide Useful Measures of Financing Constraints?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 112(1), pages 169-215.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

The CitEc project has not yet found citations to this item.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:09/197. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Jim Beardow)

or (Hassan Zaidi)

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.