Unemployment Risk and Precautionary Wealth: Evidence from Households' Balance Sheets
通过将失业风险与家庭净资产关联，检验预防性行为，发现低收入家庭无预防性财富积累，而中高收入家庭存在显著预防性效应，且结果对总净资产稳健，但不包括房屋净值的财富子项无此效应。
This paper examines precautionary behavior by relating job-loss risk to household net worth. We use existing best practice and some new strategies to deal with some problematic issues inherent in this literature regarding proxying uncertainty, instrumentation, and incorporating theoretical restrictions. We do not find precautionary variation in the wealth holdings of households with low permanent income, but do find precautionary effects for moderate and higher-income households. When the dependent variable is total net worth, these findings are robust to several alternative specifications. But we do not find precautionary responses in subaggregates of wealth that exclude home equity. © 2003 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.