The cultural origin of saving behavior

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

September 12, 2018

Summary:

Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. The accepted view in economics so far is that culture does not have any effect on savings. We revisit this evidence using a novel dataset, which allows us to study the saving behavior of up to three generations of immigrants in the United Kingdom. Against the backdrop of existing evidence, we find that cultural preferences are an important explanation for cross-country differences in saving behavior, and their relevance persists up to three generations.

Published in

PLoS ONE

Volume

Volume: 13

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202290

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

© 2018 Costa-Font et al.

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.


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