Household Composition and Savings: An Overview

Content In recent years the literature on household saving behavior has been enriched by a number of contributions focusing on the problem of modelling a household as a single decision unit. It has reasonably been argued that with respect to household consumption and saving behavior the simple approach of modelling households as one representative decider could involve major mistakes. Thus the literature has enriched the basic model by incorporating variables that describe the composition of a household examples being the number and age of children, household member’s life expectancies and the intrahousehold distribution of income. This paper reviews these developments and empirical results in the latest literature, with a particular focus on intra-household income distributions.