For useful comments, we thank Joe Kaboski and seminar participants at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Notre Dame's macro research group, Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute, and the Hong Kong Monetary Institute. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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We present a model of household life-cycle saving decisions in order to quantify the impact of demographic changes on aggregate household saving rates in Japan, China, and India. The observed age distributions help explain the contrasting saving patterns over time across the three countries. In the model simulations, the growing number of retirees suppresses Japanese saving rates, while decreasing family size increases saving rates for both China and India. Projecting forward, the model predicts lower saving rates in Japan and China.

We estimate the e¤ect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Censuses. In order to identify the causal e¤ect of home appliance ownership on married women's labor force participation rates, our empirical strategy exploits both time-series and cross-sectional variation in these two variables. To control for endogeneity, we instrument a married woman's ownership of an appliance by the average ownership rate for that appliance among single women living in the same U.S. state. Single women's labor force participation rates did not increase between 1960 and 1970. By our estimation, the di¤usion of household appliances accounts for about forty percent of the observed increase in married women's labor force participation rates during the 1960's.

We employ a model of precautionary saving to study why household saving rates are high in China and low in the United States. The use of recursive preferences gives a convenient decomposition of saving into precautionary and nonprecautionary components. Over 80% of China's saving rate and nearly all U.S. saving arises from the precautionary motive. The difference between U.S. and Chinese household income growth rates is vastly more important than income risk for explaining the saving rates. The key mechanism is that precautionary savers have target wealth‐to‐income ratios, and rapid income growth necessitates high saving rates to maintain the ratio.