that while education tends to allow for more income and consumption, it does not necessarily imply higher wealth accumulation, particularly in rural areas. In contrast, in urban areas, the more-educated households (i.e., “secondary education or more”) are overrepresented in the top 1% of the wealth distribution. Indeed, only the more-educated urban households have positive savings on average. Third, CIW averages in rural areas and urban areas are very similar across countries. The large discrepancy is between CIW averages between rural and urban areas. Indeed, the difference in average CIW between rural and urban areas is an order of magnitude larger than the difference in average CIW across countries. Such large differences should trigger important rural-to-urban migration flows, which we do observe as 60% of current urban household heads report having migrated from rural areas. We find that while rural-to-urban migration improves their consumption and income, we also find that rural-to-urban migrants are not better able to accumulate wealth than the local households in the hosting urban region. The only migration group with a positive saving rate is the one formed by urban-to-urban migrants, who represent 18% of the urban population. Finally, we find that the ability to accumulate wealth can also be related to gender and to the particular societal systems a household belongs to (i.e. matrilineal or patrilineal). In particular, for Malawi, the only group with average positive savings is the the one formed by matrilineal households in urban areas in the center of the country.

Our paper relates to a vast literature in development economics. First, our results on the inability to save and accumulate wealth in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda are directly related to the experimental results in Dupas and Robinson (2013a,b) for Kenya on savings constraints.<sup>6</sup> Similar to Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1993) findings for India, we find that the households in rural areas of East Africa that save do so in livestock and other nonhousing durables. This may be due to a lack of alternative saving options. Second, in terms of consumption insurance, Townsend (1994) and Udry (1994) suggest the presence, respectively, of informal arrangements in villages in India and northern Nigeria. These results confirm our findings of a weaker transmission from consumption to income inequality in SSA than in the United States, and in rural rather than urban areas. The phenomenon that the ability to insure consumption is stronger in rural areas than in urban areas has been previously explored in Morten (2013) and Munshi and Rosenzweig (2014) for India, and in Santaeul`alia-Llopis and Zheng (2015) for China. Two aspects set our work apart from previous studies. The first is the use of nationally representative data, which is a natural approach from our macroeconomic perspective. The second, and most important, is that we can establish the joint behavior of the triplet of CIW and document — as far as we know — for the first time the joint phenomenon of a low ability to accumulate wealth (i.e., generate growth in the economy) and a low transmission from income to consumption (i.e., a high ability

> 6See also the recent review in Karlan et al. (2014).

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