It is well accepted that households increase consumption of goods and services in response to an unexpected increase in wealth. Consensus estimates of this wealth effect are in the range of 3 to 5 cents of additional consumption spending in the long run for each additional dollar of wealth....

The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief and Reconciliation Act of 2003 has been described as textbook fiscal stimulus. Using household survey data on the self-reported qualitative response to the tax cuts, we estimate that the boost to aggregate personal consumption expenditures from the child credit...

During the 1990s, the asset portfolios of defined-benefit (DB) pension plans ballooned with the booming stock market. Due to current accounting guidelines, the robust growth in pension assets resulted in a stealthy but substantial boost to the profits of sponsoring corporations. This study...

Many firms that sponsor traditional defined benefit pensions have converted their plans to cash balance plans in the last ten years. Cash balance plans combine features of defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans, and yet their introduction has proven considerably more...

In recent years, a handful of countries have converted the financing of their social security systems from pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) to partial or full funding. Privatization is viewed as one way to insulate social security from the political and demographic pressures that currently threaten the...