Managing Risks: What Russian Households Do To Smooth Consumption?

The increasing availability of rich (panel) data provides many opportunities to test theories on consumption smoothing behaviour. At the same time, the informational requirements in terms of data and modeling are high and very context specific, thus requiring a filtering of essential explanatory ingredients. In this paper the authors show how conceptual and exploratory empirical analysis can contribute to this filtering process. They develop a conceptual framework to analyze possible smoothing arrangements of households distinguishing between various smoothing mechanisms, institutional smoothing partners and required assets.