Are there cultural effects on saving

The results are consistent with the other two saving measures. The effect of culture on the change in wealth has a similar impact across the three generations. This study examines the effect of culture and its persistence on savings. We show evidence of a robust association between immigrant saving behavior and the saving rates in their country of origin that persists up to the third generation.

Our results are consistent across different measures of savings two self-reported savings measures and savings calculated as wealth change over time. These results go against the prevailing evidence suggesting that culture does not play a role in shaping savings behavior, and instead indicate that culture cannot be disregarded in the study of saving differences across countries.

All specifications include age dummies, region dummies, wave dummies and eight occupational class indicators as in Table 1. We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for comments that greatly improved the paper. We also thank Belen Saenz de Miera Juarez for her outstanding research assistance. This money is entirely used to hire a research assistant who cleaned and set up the large scale longitudinal data Understanding Society.

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. PLoS One. Published online Sep Nicola Lacetera, Editor. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Received Feb 20; Accepted Jul This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Associated Data Supplementary Materials S1 Table: List of countries of origin and number of observations for different generations of immigrants.

S2 Table: Summary statistics. S3 Table: Log amount saved, controlling for permanent income. S4 Table: Propensity to save: Probit estimates for whether an individual saves or not. S1 File: Replication package. Abstract Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries.

Introduction Savings are important drivers of economic growth and are pre-requisite to the sustainability of pension systems and the international balance of trade. Material and methods Variable construction and definition Our main sample consists of individuals older than thirteen. Outcome variables We use three measures of saving behavior.

Descriptive analysis Before starting our empirical analysis, we first examine whether there exists a systematic correlation between saving rates in the country of origin and saving behavior among the three generations of immigrants.

Open in a separate window. Fig 1. Partial correlation plot: Log amount saved for first generation immigrants. Fig 3. Partial correlation plot: Log amount saved for third generation immigrants. Fig 2. Partial correlation plot: Log amount saved for second generation immigrants.

Results and discussion The estimates for saving rates are reported in Table 1. Table 1 'Log-amount saved' self-reported amount of positive savings. No Qualification College and above 0. Father did not go to School Father left school with no qualification 0.

Conclusions This study examines the effect of culture and its persistence on savings. Supporting information S1 Table List of countries of origin and number of observations for different generations of immigrants. DOCX Click here for additional data file. S2 Table Summary statistics. S3 Table Log amount saved, controlling for permanent income. S4 Table Propensity to save: Probit estimates for whether an individual saves or not.

S1 File Replication package. ZIP Click here for additional data file. Acknowledgments We thank the editor and two anonymous referees for comments that greatly improved the paper.

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Carroll , Christopher D. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar.