As part of the Brown Bag Lunch series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Ying Xu, PhD Researcher in International Economics.

A Cross-Country Perspective on the Saving Glut of the Rich 

Abstract: We combine consumption and income surveys with national accounts data to estimate saving across the income distribution in European economies and the US since the 1990s. We find that saving by the richest 10 percent is higher in the US than in Europe. The US also shows lower levels of saving by middle income households than in Europe, with similar dissaving patterns by all bottom 5 deciles. While saving by lower income households has declined somewhat from the 1990s until the GFC across our sample, saving by the rich has been broadly stable. This contrasts with the patterns identified in Mian, Straub, and Sufi (2021) for the US since the 1960s, coined the “saving glut of the rich”. Our results also shed new light on the relative size of the “foreign saving glut” in some countries, as well as the adjustment of current account balances in the aftermath of the GFC.