Browsing by Author "Cavallo, Eduardo"

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Open Access
Precautionary strategies and household savings
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2015) Aizenman, Joshua; Cavallo, Eduardo; Noy, Ilan
Why do people save? A strand of the literature has emphasized the role of ‘precautionary’ motives; i.e., private agents save in order to mitigate unexpected future income shocks. An implication is that in countries faced with more macroeconomic volatility and risk, private saving should be higher. From the observable data, however, we find a negative correlation between risk and private saving in cross-country comparisons, particularly in developing countries. We provide a plausible explanation for the disconnect between precautionary-saving theory and the empirical evidence that is based on a model with a richer account for the various modes of ‘precautionary’ behavior by private agents, in cases where institutions are weaker and labor informality is prevalent. In such environments, household saving decisions are intertwined with firms’ investment decisions. As a result, the interaction between saving behavior, broadly construed, and aggregate risk and uncertainty, may be more complex than is frequently assumed.
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Where is the money? Post-disaster foreign aid flows
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2013) Becerra, Oscar; Cavallo, Eduardo; Noy, Ilan
We describe the flows of aid after large catastrophic natural disasters by using the extensive record of bilateral aid flows, by aid sector, available through the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee. For each large donor, we identify the extent of cross-sector re-allocation that is occurring in the aftermath of large disasters whereby humanitarian aid increases but other types of aid may decrease. Our evidence suggests that the expectation of large surges in post disaster aid flows is not warranted given the past diversity of experience of global foreign aid by donor and by event. We find no evidence, however, that donors reallocate aid between recipient countries (cross-recipient reallocation). These observations suggest that countries which are predicted to face increasing losses from natural disasters in the coming decades (and almost all are) should be devoting significant resources for prevention, insurance, and mitigation.