Three essays in Chinese reforms and household savings

In this dissertation, we study three issues in Chinese reforms and household saving decisions. In Chapter 1, we review the existing studies on the relation between various of the Chinese reforms and the household saving decisions. Chapter 2 focus on the housing finance reform effect on the saving rate. Using the two-step estimation procedure, we find that as a pillar of the housing finance reform, the Housing Accumulation Fund positively affect the household saving rate and the home ownership. In Chapter 3, we discuss the effect of the health care reform occurred in 1998. We find that the 1998 reform makes the urban households be less protected and induced them to save more in order to deal with potential future health care expenditure due to health shocks.