We study nearly 7,000 retirement accounts during the April 1994-August 1998 period. Several interesting patterns emerge. Most asset allocations are extreme (either 100 percent or zero percent in equities) and there is inertia in asset allocations. Equity allocations are higher for males, married...

In models of steady investment-driven growth, an individual's propensity to save depends on how much of his income is drawn from accumulated factors of production ('capital') rather than from nonaccumulated factors. When agents are heterogeneous in this respect, growth-oriented policies have...

The authors propose and solve an optimizing model that explains counterintuitive effects of fiscal policy in terms of expectations. If government spending follows an upward-trending stochastic process that the public believes may fall sharply when it reaches specific "trigger" points, then...

Recent contributions emphasize that the presence of exchange-rate target zones has important effects on the within-band behavior of exchange rates when agents are forward-looking. The authors find that the implications of available models are inconsistent with European exchange-rate data, and...