Employer matching of employee 401(k) contributions can provide a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension-plan design in the United States. Using detailed administrative contribution, earnings, and pension-plan data from the Health and Retirement Study, this...

We propose a simple saving-based measure of the cyclical component in GDP. The measure is motivated by the prediction that the representative consumer changes savings in response to temporary deviations of income from its stochastic trend, while satisfying a present-value budget constraint. To...

Several years ago, the Dallas Fed's annual report featured an essay entitled "The Churn." The churn is our term for what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction." A dynamic economy like ours can grow and make room for the new only if we allow parts of the economy to shrink....

Remarks before the Ninth Annual R.I.S.E. (Redefining Investment Strategy Education) Forum Dayton, Ohio, March 26, 2009 ; "Here is a take-home quote from Charles Mackay's classic tome "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", written in 1841: 'Men think in herds...[and] they go...

Standard portfolio theories of the home bias are disconnected from corporate finance theories of insider ownership. We merge the two into what we call the optimal ownership theory of the home bias. The theory has the following components. In countries with poor governance, it is optimal for...