Tag: discretionary savings

Senior woman doing finances at home

Why Don’t Americans Save?

Working Paper by

November 9, 2004

Abstract This paper provides an examination of the decline in the household saving rate over the past two decades from both the macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives. Between 1980-84 and 2000-04 private saving fell more than 8 percentage points of U.S. GDP. At the aggregate level, about 40 percent of the fall in the household saving…