Measures for savings and saving rates in the German SAVE data set

Content Saving is frequently measured using a one-shot question for total annual saving during the preceding year. This type of one-shot recall question might cause severe measurement errors since saving is a complicated concept which consists of various components, many of which respondents might not be fully aware of. This paper uses the SAVE data to analyze potential errors generated by this kind of questioning and provides remedies in order to construct the most of reliable saving measure given the information at hand.