Consumption Smoothing in Metropolis: Evidence from the Working-class Households in Prewar Tokyo

Abstract

I analyze the risk-coping behaviors among factory worker households in early 20th-century Tokyo. I digitize a unique daily longitudinal survey dataset on household budgets to examine the extent to which consumption is affected by idiosyncratic shocks. I find that while the households were so vulnerable that the shocks impacted their consumption levels, the income elasticity for food consumption is relatively low in the short-run perspective. The result from mechanism analysis suggests that credit purchases played a role in smoothing the short-run food consumption. The event-study analysis using the adverse health shock as the idiosyncratic income shock confirms the robustness of the results. I also find evidence that the misassignment of payday in data aggregation results in a systematic attenuation bias due to measurement error.