Precautionary Behavior, Migrant Networks, and Household Consumption Decisions: An Empirical Analysis Using Household Panel Data from Rural China
检验了中国农村家庭消费决策中的预防性储蓄行为，发现面临中等消费风险的家庭有10%的储蓄源于预防动机，贫困家庭这一比例升至15%；同时，村庄移民网络规模越大，家庭预防性储蓄越少。
We develop a test of precautionary behavior in the consumption decisions of rural agricultural households. Among surveyed households facing a median level of consumption risk, 10% of savings can be attributed to a precautionary motive, and this increases to 15% for households with consumption per capita below the poverty line. We next use distant lags of local rainfall shocks uncorrelated with current consumption growth to identify the size of migrant networks outside the village, and then present evidence that both poor and nonpoor households engage in less precautionary saving as the size of the village migrant network increases. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.