This paper reviews theoretical argumrents and empirical evidence regarding the interest elasticity of savings. It concludes that there are strong theoretical reasons to expect an increase in after tax rates of return to increase private savings. Moreover, the empirical rrethods used in most...

China eventually becomes the world's saver and, thereby, the developed world's savoir with respect to its long-run supply of capital and long-run general equilibrium prospects. And, rather than seeing the real wage per unit of human capital fall, the West and Japan see it rise by one fifth by...

Data for world savings rates do not suggest that an aggregate glut of world savings has depressed US and international interest rates in recent years. Unusual but offsetting changes in savings rates have been limited to three regions: sharp declines in the US have been matched by sharp increases...

In the past two decades the widely reported personal saving rate in the United States has dropped from double digits to below zero. First, we attempt to account for the decline in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) saving rate. The macroeconomic literature suggests that about half...

A review of the Japanese National Accounts reveals that the Japanese household sector has apparently suffered a capital loss of some 400 trillion-yen in 1990 consumption prices since 1970. This loss is large enough to explain most of the Japanese recession of the 1990's. We can trace some...

By allowing people to obtain divorce without the consent of their spouse, Unilateral Divorce Laws (UDLs) increase the risk of divorce. Using the staggered introduction of UDLs across European countries, we show that households exposed to UDLs for longer time accumulate more savings. This effect...

Recently, my claim that depreciation reported in the Japanese national accounts is underestimated by a substantial margin has been challenged by Dekle and Summers (NBER Working Paper No. 3690), on the ground that the implied depreciation rate (ratio of depreciation to the capital stock) is...

We estimate channels of international risk sharing between European Monetary Union (EMU), European Union, and other OECD countries 1992-2007. We focus on risk sharing through savings, factor income flows, and capital gains. Risk sharing through factor income and capital gains was close to zero...

We analyze the saving motives of European households using micro-data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which is conducted by the European Central Bank. We find that the rank ordering of saving motives differs greatly depending on what criterion is used to rank them. For...