ストウ　イサオ   Suto Isao   須藤　功    所属   明治大学  政治経済学部    職種   専任教授
言語種別	英語
発行・発表の年月	2011/01
形態種別	学術雑誌
標題	Early Twenty-century Japanese Worker Saving: Precautionary Behaviour before a Social Safety Net
執筆形態	共著(筆頭者以外)
掲載誌名	Cliometrica
巻・号・頁	5(1),pp.1-25
著者・共著者	John A. James
概要	This paper pools data from independent household surveys of Japanese workers roughly spanning the Taishō period (1912–1926), a time before private-business or government-provided social safety nets. First, we construct estimates of permanent and transitory income and then estimate saving functions consistent with intertemporal optimization. The saving behaviour of Japanese worker households is in turn compared with that of American worker households before World War I, a time when they too lacked access to general social services. The estimated marginal propensities to save out of permanent and transitory incomes were quite similar for Japanese and American worker households, but the Japanese ones saved more at a given level of income. The economic environment facing Japanese workers, however, seemed to be no riskier than that facing American workers. We attribute instead this result primarily to the widespread postal savings banks in Japan which increased the convenience and decreased the risk of saving.