Abstract

The project aims to contribute to the research on the determinants of household saving behaviour, and on developments that are capable to explain the decline in the household saving rate that is found in aggregate data. Possible determinants for the propensity to save include socio-demographic factors, as well as factors that are linked to the employment characteristics of households (e.g. marginal part-time employment, self-employment, short-term employment, recipients of (means-tested) unemployment benefits or other government benefits). Using the income and expenditure surveys (EVS) from 1998 and 2008, we aim to assess the effects of shifts in the income distribution and in the age structure of households (demographic change) on the aggregate savings rate. Before testing hypotheses in regression models we present some descriptives on the savings behaviour of households, distinguishing between household characteristics and the year of the survey. As for the specification of the regression model to examine the determinants of saving behaviour, the saving rate (and closer definitions thereof such as ‘financial savings’) as well as the propensity to save are considered as dependent variables. As a next step, we apply decomposition analysis to examine the causes of the change in the saving rate over time.