The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China

By Shang-jin Wei, Xiaobo Zhang. Journal of Political Economy, 2009

972 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son raise their savings in a competitive manner in order to improve their son’s relative attractiveness for marriage. The pressure on savings spills over to other households. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990–2007.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/422934a69c06169a33c90e95b557a1e47cf4384a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Lixing Li
2. Xiaoyu Wu
3. Zhuan Xie
4. Xiaobo Zhang
5. Shang-jin Wei
6. A. Shleifer
7. Junsen Zhang
8. Edward L. Glaeser

In Gender Studies

1. Lixing Li
2. Xiaoyu Wu
3. Zhuan Xie
4. Shang-jin Wei
5. Xiaobo Zhang
6. A. Shleifer
7. L. Edlund
8. Junsen Zhang

Citations in the corpus

• Sex Ratios and Crime: Evidence from China (2013, background): “The paper perhaps most closely related to ours is Wei and Zhang (2011) who argued that male sex ratios have contributed to China’s high savings rate.”
• Risks in China's Financial System (2018, neutral): “See also Wei and Zhang (2011), Chen and Chen (2016), Choukhmane, Coeurdacier, and Jin (2016), and Copper and Zhu (2017) for more recent work.”
• Income Uncertainty and Household Savings in China (2010, neutral): “, Modigliani and Cao, 2004; Kuijs, 2006), provincial-level data (e.g., Qian, 1998; Kraay, 2000; Horioka and Wan, 2007; Wei and Zhang, 2009) and micro data (e.”
• Families in Macroeconomics (2016, neutral): “In China, for example, in 2005 over 120 boys were born for each 100 girls (Wei and Zhang, 2011).”
• Housing Price and Entrepreneurship in China (2014, positive): “The competition in the marriage market was intensified by the changing population structure (Wei and Zhang, 2011a).”
• The impact of digital finance on household consumption: Evidence from China (2020, background): “,2011); the fifth explanation involves cultural traditions and consumption habits (Modigliani and Cao, 2004); while the sixth explanation is the hypothesis of competitive saving (Wei and Zhang, 2011).”
• From “Made in China” to “Innovated in China”: Necessity, Prospect, and Challenges (2017, positive): “In order to attract potential brides, families with sons choose to work harder, save more, and take on more risks, including exhibiting a higher propensity to be entrepreneurs (Wei and Zhang 2011a, b; Chang and Zhang 2015; Wei, Zhang, and Liu forthcoming).”
• Demographic Patterns and Household Saving in China (2015, neutral): “…motive in conjunction with relatively high income risk and changes in the social safety net (Meng 2003; Chamon et al. 2010; Chamon and Prasad 2010), unintended sexratio imbalances resulting from the one-child policy (Wei and Zhang 2011), and changes in the age-earnings pro le (Song and Yang 2010).”