With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully-funded defined-contribution social security system tries to exploit the equity premium by selling a dollar of...

This essay discusses the reasons for and implications of the decline in real interest rates around the world over the past several decades. It suggests that the decline in interest rates is largely explicable from trends in saving, growth, and markups. In this environment, greater government...

We examine a model of a small open economy in which there is free international mobility of financial capital, investment in capital goods and a non-traded good. Such an environment is rich enough to explain several phenomena that are inexplicable in more barren models. We suggest an explanation...

The finding of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) that countriesf investment rates are highly correlated with their national saving rates has by now been confirmed by many subsequent studies, even though their inference that international capital mobility nust be low has not been as widely accepted....

This paper explores the characteristics of individual portfolio holdings in a world economy with a unified securities market where there are many countries, each with its own tax rates and inflation rate. When nominal interest is taxable but income to equity owners is tax exempt in all...

This article examines how the availability of annuities affects savings and inequality in economies in which neither private nor public pensions initially exist. The absence of widespread market or government annuity insurance is clearly descriptive of many less developed countries in the world...

This paper examines the closed economy effects of government policies that vary with respect to whether they treat newly produced capital differently from old capital. Policies that do make this distinction are denoted investment policies, while those that do not are labelled savings policies....

The evidence and analysis in this paper support the earlier findings of Feldstein and Horioka (1980) that sustained increases in domestic savings rates induce approximately equal increases in domestic rates of investment. New estimates for the post-OPEC period 1974-79 imply that each extra...

The standard model of optimal growth, interpreted as a model of a market economy with infinitely long-lived agents, does not allow separation of the savings decisions of agents from the investment decisions of firms. Investment is essentially passive: the "one good" assumption leads to a...