America is probably facing a slowdown in the rate of natural population increase and possibly a slowdown in productivity growth. We argue that, if these two factors depress the rate of future economic growth, one cannot assume that the past performance of asset returns is indicative of future...

Nonindustrial countries that have relied more on foreign finance have not grown faster in the long run as standard theoretical models predict. The reason may lie in these countries’ limited ability to absorb foreign capital, especially because their financial systems have difficulty allocating...

This paper considers whether the recent buildup in emerging market countries’ international reserves can be justified as precautionary insurance against volatility in capital flows. It presents a simple, welfare-based model of the optimal level of reserves to deal with the risk of capital...

This paper examines the wealth of successive birth cohorts in the United States using data from the 1989-2001 Surveys of Consumer Finances. We find that older households (those aged 55-64, 65-74 or 75-84) in 2001 had more wealth than households of similar age in 1989, but that the same was not...

Defined-benefit pensions typically expose workers to a form of financial risk that they are ill positioned to bear and unable to hedge. If workers understand that risk, they will offer employers a lower “price” (in the form of salary concessions) than the capital markets would offer for the...

We develop a three-region economic model to assess how a significant reduction in global current account imbalances might impact dollar, euro, and Asian real exchange rates under alternative scenarios. Sizable exchange rate shifts appear to be a necessary corollary of adjustment even under...

Discussions of whether a housing bubble exists generally rely on indirect barometers such as rapidly increasing prices, unrealistic expectations of future price increases, and rising ratios of housing price indexes to indexes of household income. Such measures cannot, however, answer the key...

This paper examines the durability of what we have elsewhere called the Revived Bretton Woods system. We show that the recent behavior of long-term interest rates is consistent with market expectations that the system will last for a considerable period. We also show that emerging economies with...

The known energy resource base is more than sufficient to provide a growing world population with energy on the scale to which the industrial countries have grown accustomed and to which the developing countries aspire. Environmental constraints exist but have promising solutions, provided...