The Household Formation and Saving Behavior

• Main Authors: Wen-Jin Yang, 楊文靚
• Other Authors: Li-Ly Jiang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/58803927027880858346

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 產業經濟學系 === 88 === 　There are two significant phenomena in Taiwan recently. One is the saving rates of families to decrease , and the other is the nuclearization of family. The studies of Taiwan’s saving focused on economic and demographic variables but ignored household pattern. As pointed out by Kotlikoff and Spivak (1981), families can self-insure against uncertain dates of death through implicit or explicit agreement with respect to consumption and interfamily transfers. Therefore, in the absence of perfect annuity market, these risk-sharing arrangements provide powerful incentives for family formation. The objective of this thesis is to study the relationship between household formation and saving behavior under uncertainty, which are joint determined. This paper adopts McElroy (1985) Nash bargaining model to derive saving functions and indirect utility functions that determine household membership. Using the method of simulation, we compare the saving behavior of different types of household and report the utility gain for parents and their child respectively if they choose to form one household together. The data of 1989 Women Living Survey is used in the empirical study. We apply Probit model to analyze the choice of household formation. Based on the estimation, we infer saving determinants furthermore. The analyses show that saving and household formation are indeed joint determined. And the significantly different saving behavior is found between nuclear and stem families. Families provide insurance against the uncertainty of life and the function thus exerts influence on savings.