Household Savings in Russia during the Transition

Abstract

We exploit panel data from the second phase of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to investigate the household characteristics that explain saving during a period of extreme dislocation. Among our more noteworthy findings, we find evidence of short-term consumption smoothing behavior as households respond to temporary income shocks. Conditional on income level, we find that savings rates are higher in households benefiting from non-standard (likely transitory) sources of support such as private transfers and sales of home produced food; savings rates are lower, moreover, in households suffering from unemployment or payment arrears. We also confirm the robustness of an atypical U-shaped age-savings relationship to multivariate specifications. And finally, we turn up strong support for an inverse relationship between the household’s stock of durables and its saving rate.