美联储-解释世界储蓄（英）

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve SystemInternational Finance Discussion PapersISSN 1073-2500 (Print)ISSN 2767-4509 (Online)Number 1416August 2025Explaining World SavingsColin Caines and Amartya LahiriPlease cite this paper as:Caines, Colin and Amartya Lahiri (2025). “Explaining World Savings,” International Fi-nance Discussion Papers 1416. Washington: Board of Governors of the Federal ReserveSystem, https://doi.org/10.17016/IFDP.2025.1416.NOTE: International Finance Discussion Papers (IFDPs) are preliminary materials circulated to stimu-late discussion and critical comment. The analysis and conclusions set forth are those of the authors anddo not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or the Board of Governors. Referencesin publications to the International Finance Discussion Papers Series (other than acknowledgement) shouldbe cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Recent IFDPs are availableon the Web at www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/. This paper can be downloaded without charge from theSocial Science Research Network electronic library at www.ssrn.com.Explaining World SavingsColin Caines∗ and Amartya Lahiri† ‡AbstractSaving rates are significantly different across countries and remain different for longperiods of time. This paper provides an explanation for this phenomenon. We formalizea model of a world economy comprised of open economies inhabited by heterogeneousagents endowed with recursive preferences. Our assumed preferences imply increasingmarginal impatience of agents as their consumption rises relative to average consump-tion of a reference group. Using measured productivity as the sole exogenous driver,we show that the model can not only reproduce the sustained long run differences inaverage saving rates across countries, but also provides a good fit to the time seriesbehavior of saving observed in the data.Keywords: World savings, recursive preferencesJEL Classification: E2, F3, F4∗Division of International Finance, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, D.C.,20551, U.S.A.†Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, 6000 Iona Drive, Vancouver, BC V6T1L4, Canada.‡The views in this paper are solely the responsibility of the authors and should not be interpreted asreflecting the views of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or of any other person associatedwith the Federal Reserve System. We would like to thank our referees, Enrique Mendoza, Igor Livshits,seminar participants at UBC, and conference participants at the SED, Midwest Macro, North AmericanEconometric Society, and Asian Econometric Society meetings for helpful comments and discussions. Thanksalso to Roger Farmer whose previous work with Lahiri provided the basis for this paper.1IntroductionData on the world saving distribution reveals that cross-country differences in saving ratesare significant and persistent. This is problematic for the standard model wit