Consumption Smoothing in the Working-Class Households of Interwar Japan

I analyze factory worker households in the early 1920s in Osaka to examine idiosyncratic income shocks and consumption. Using the household-level monthly panel dataset, I find that while households could not fully cope with idiosyncratic income shocks at that time, they mitigated fluctuations in indispensable consumption during economic hardship. In terms of risk-coping mechanisms, I find suggestive evidence that savings institutions helped mitigate vulnerabilities and that both using borrowing institutions and adjusting labor supply served as risk-coping strategies among households with less savings

Archaeology · Class (philosophy) · Consumption (sociology) · Consumption smoothing · Economics · Geography · Interwar period · Keynesian economics · Political science · Politics · Smoothing · Social science · Sociology · Statistics · Working class · World War II · Agricultural risk and resilience · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Income, Poverty, and Inequality · Law · Mathematics

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