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Intergenerational Precautionary Savings in Europe *
Author(s) -
Scervini Francesco,
Trucchi Serena
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
oxford bulletin of economics and statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0084
pISSN - 0305-9049
DOI - 10.1111/obes.12461
Subject(s) - precautionary savings , offspring , economics , exploit , demographic economics , public economics , macroeconomics , biology , recession , computer science , pregnancy , genetics , computer security
In this paper, we study whether precautionary saving motives have an intergenerational component; namely whether and to what extent the income uncertainty of younger generations affects the savings of their parents. To this end, we exploit a cross‐country European longitudinal household dataset collecting information on parents and their offspring, augmented with indicators for their offspring's income risk. We find that savings significantly respond to changes in income risk, also across generations. This finding is robust to several checks and displays heterogeneity across countries, which is consistent with substitutability between private and public insurance tools.