CAPITAL ACCUMULATION HAS BEEN EMPHASISED AS THE MAJOR FACTOR GOVERING THE RATE OF DEVELOPMENT. THIS STUDY THEREFORE AIMS EXPLORING IN THE LIGHT OF PAST TRENDS, THE ROLE AND SCOPE OF COMMERCIAL BANKS AS FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES IN MOBILIZING DOMESTIC SAVINGS FOR DEVELOPMENT AND THE CONSTRAINTS IN...

This paper explores whether habit formation in the representative agent’s preferences can explain two failures of the standard permanent income model: the sensitivity to lagged consumer sentiment, and to predictable changes in income. I show that in a habit formation model, the sensitivity of...

We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income, to evaluate the nature of increased income inequality in the 1980s and 90s. We decompose unexpected changes in family income into transitory and permanent, and idiosyncratic and aggregate components, and estimate the contribution...

Existing findings suggest that standard, frictionless, expected-utility models have difficulty accounting for average and for median holdings of wealth and of risky assets, partly as a result of the largely unexplained limited proportion of stockholders among households. We analyze life-cycle...

This paper studies effects of two classes of borrowing constraints, collateral- and income-based, on wealth accumulation, portfolio behavior and on precautionary motives. We examine the sensitivity of solutions to tightness of constraints, education level, and preference parameters. The models...

We examine a model that generalizes the standard buffer-stock model of savings to accommodate durables, nondurables and a collateralized liquidity constraint, with and without adjustment costs in the durables market. Since there is no known analytical solution to the model, we solve it...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...