Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom.
Anderson School of Management, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Sep 12;13(9):e0202290. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0202290. eCollection 2018.
Traditional economic interpretations have not been successful in explaining differences in saving rates across countries. One hypothesis is that savings respond to cultural specific social norms. The accepted view in economics so far is that culture does not have any effect on savings. We revisit this evidence using a novel dataset, which allows us to study the saving behavior of up to three generations of immigrants in the United Kingdom. Against the backdrop of existing evidence, we find that cultural preferences are an important explanation for cross-country differences in saving behavior, and their relevance persists up to three generations.
传统的经济解释在解释各国储蓄率的差异方面并不成功。有一种假设认为，储蓄是对文化特有的社会规范的反应。到目前为止，经济学界普遍认为，文化对储蓄没有任何影响。我们使用一个新的数据集重新研究了这一证据，该数据集使我们能够研究英国多达三代移民的储蓄行为。在现有证据的背景下，我们发现文化偏好是解释储蓄行为跨国差异的一个重要因素，而且这种相关性一直持续到三代人。
