This paper scrutinizes the role of prolonged, expansionary monetary policy on the savings behavior of Japanese households, focusing on the dramatic change of the household savings behavior since 1998, from high to low savings. Existing literature generally attributes this behavioral change to the country's shift from a high-growth to a low-growth economy and its demographic change. In contrast, this paper empirically examines changes in the incentives for saving and the ability to save connected to monetary policy. It finds that monetary policy has had a significant impact on Japan's household behavior via three channels: the interest rate channel, the redistribution channel, and the wealth channel.
In this paper, we attempt to shed light on whether Japanese households are rational or if their behavior is influenced by culture and social norms by examining their saving and bequest behavior. To summarize our main findings, we find that Japan's household saving rate showed great volatility, was often low and even negative, and was high only during the 25-year period from around 1960 until the mid-1980s (if we exclude the war years) and that we can explain the high level of, and trends over time in, Japan's household saving rate via various socioeconomic and policy variables. This seems to suggest that the Japanese are not a saving-loving people and that their saving behavior is not governed by culture and social norms. Moreover, the bequest behavior of the Japanese suggests that they are less altruistic toward their children and less reliant on their children than other peoples, suggesting that the alleged social norm of strong family ties in Japan is largely a myth, and the Japanese do not appear to be appreciably more concerned about the continuation of the family line or the family business than other peoples, suggesting that the influence of the “ie” system is apparently not so pervasive either. However, we argue that these findings do not necessarily mean that culture and social norms do not matter.
This paper develops and tests a model of Japan’s household savings rate, based on the life-cycle hypothesis that the primary motive for savings is provision for retirement. The paper shows that Japan’s high household savings rate in recent decades reflects the positive influence of rapid economic growth, leading to a prolonged retirement period through the wealth and life-expectancy effects of an income change, which has initially outweighed the negative combined influence of improvements in public pension benefits and the aging of the population. It projects that the savings rate will decline substantially in coming decades as the negative influence accelerates.
This volume brings together various analytical studies the IMF staff has undertaken on the Japanese economy, focusing on two areas of particular interest for both longer-term economic performance and recent cyclical developments. The first is Japan's saving behavior, the second is the remarkable swing in asset prices that occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Analysis of consumption and saving decisions by households has always been one of the most active areas of research in economics--and with good reason. Private consumption is the most important component of aggregate demand in a capitalist economy, and explaining consumption is the key element in most macroeconomic forecasting models. To evaluate the effect of government policies invariably requires the knowledge of how they change parameters relevant for household decision making. Understanding Saving collects eleven papers by economist Fumio Hayashi, along with two previously unpublished chapters, for a total of thirteen chapters. The monograph, which brings together Hayashi's empirical research on saving, is divided into three sections. Part I, "Liquidity Constraints", contains five studies that test the well-known implication of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income hypothesis that households shield consumption from income fluctuations. Part II, "Risk-Sharing and Altruism", contains three papers that examine the interactions between related and unrelated households predicted by the hypothesis for the US and Japanese households. The three papers in Part III, "Japanese Saving Behavior", present the author's explanation of the high saving rate in postwar Japan.
When Japan experienced high economic growth, its society was characterized by low inequality in income, a high saving rate and a low consumption rate. However, after Japan's transition to slow economic growth, it was said that the society lost income mobility, and the inequality among households deteriorated. In addition, the aggregate household saving rate dropped drastically. Meanwhile, consumption expanded, which gave people more options regarding their expenditure. With this background, this thesis examines the impacts of these changes-- income mobility over time, savings rate changes, and intra-household allocation--using a long run panel data set for Japan. Chapter 1 studies income mobility in Japanese society. Household income mobility at the macro level is measured by six different methods. The results show that as a whole, household income mobility became lower in the long-run. At the micro level, unconditional micro income mobility indicated that it is possible that poorer people would catch up with richer people. Finally, conditional micro income mobility also shows that there exists conditional convergence. In Chapter 2, the causes for the decrease in the aggregate household saving are analyzed. The aggregate time series analysis reveals that the increase in the ratio of the aged population ratio partially explains the sharp decrease in the household saving rate. By using household level panel data, it was found that savings driven by the motive of home ownership could partly account for this decrease in the saving rate. The increasing burden of education expenditure is among the strongest candidates for explaining the change. Finally, some weak indirect evidence in support of the target saving hypothesis is found. In Chapter 3, the characteristics of intra-household allocation are discussed. Using the Slutsky symmetry test, the unitary model could not be rejected for the consumption behavior of one-person households. Meanwhile, the tests for SR1, distribution factor proportionality and linearity indicated that the collective model might explain the consumption behavior of two-person households. Finally, the hypothesis that three-person households could be represented by the collective model for two-person households could not be rejected.
