Household saving behavior: Empirical evidence based on Mexican Households Surveys

In this dissertation I study different aspects of households saving behavior in Mexico. In chapter one, I use micro data from ten rounds of the Households Surveys of Income and Expenditures (ENIGH), to offer a multivariable analysis and investigate the empirical determinants of household saving behavior in Mexico for 1984--2006. Using the Life Cycle Hypothesis (LCH) as theoretical background, I identify some stylized facts of household saving behavior and address the issue of to what extent this behavior is in line with the LCH's predictions. Through the implementation of cross-sectional analysis and synthetic panels, I carry out a comprehensive characterization of saving patterns that complements and extends previous studies in several dimensions. The results suggest that demographics characteristics and family composition capture some of the household's motivation for saving more at the early and last stages of the life cycle, resulting in a U-shaped age saving profile. The inclusion of variables capturing the relaxation of liquidity constraints exhibits the negative correlation between access to financial resources and lower saving rates.;In the second chapter, I analyze the impact of financial liberalization and aggregate shocks on households saving behavior. In particular, I investigate to what extent households with access to financial resources modify their saving behavior when the economy experiences either credit expansions---a byproduct of financial liberalization and macroeconomic stability---or credit contractions resulting from financial and banking crises. I estimate a saving function and employ a difference in difference technique to identify the effects of these two types of "macroeconomic shocks" on households saving behavior. It is found that the effects of macro shocks and financial liberalization are stronger for households with better access to financial resources.;In 1997, the Mexican government approved a comprehensive pension reform that affected the formal labor force in the private sector. The legislation did not affect workers employed in the public sector, however. In chapter three, I use this policy change as a natural experiment to evaluate the impact of pension reforms on household saving behavior. The results indicate that households adopting the new funded pension system increase their saving rates systematically.