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Working Paper
Consumption smoothing among working-class American families before social insurance
This paper examines whether the saving decisions of a large sample of working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century are consistent with consumption smoothing tendencies in the spirit of the permanent income hypothesis. We develop two econometric models to decompose reported annual incomes from micro-data into expected and unexpected components, then we estimate marginal propensities to save out of each component of income. The two methodologies deliver similar regression estimates and reveal empirical patterns consistent with those reported in other recent research ...
