The East Asian currency crisis in 1997 adversely affected many Korean households. This paper investigates Korean households' coping strategies during the 1997 crisis.  To this aim, we employ household-level panel data during 1994-98 and estimate consumption Euler equations with endogenous credit constraints as a switching regression model.  Three empirical findings emerge.  First, credit was not an effective risk-coping device in 1998, suggesting serious negative effects of the credit crunch at household level.  Second, private transfers instead appeared to act as an ex-post coping mechanism.  Finally, we do not find public transfers to be an effective coping device during the initial period of the crisis.  This could be primarily because social safety net programs were not yet in place during the period covered by our analysis.

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