Some retirement plans allow the participant to choose how funds are invested. Having to direct investments may provide the participant with financial education. This paper finds that households covered by pension plans in which the employee chooses investments are significantly more apt to hold...

Because employer-provided pensions represent an important source of income during retirement, accurate information on pension coverage would seem to be crucial for making sound decisions on retirement timing, saving, and portfolio allocation. However, previous research suggests that workers'...

The issue of whether higher lifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income is an important factor in the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policy. Despite an outpouring of research on this topic in the 1950s and 1960s, the question remains unresolved and has since received...

Previous research suggests that, in partial equilibrium, individuals whose decision-making exhibits a present-bias--such as hyperbolic discounters who tend to over-consume--will be in favor of having a floor imposed on their savings. In this paper, I show it is quite difficult for the...

This paper explores how altruistic parents structure transfer rules in response to potential incentive problems and how the investment behavior of children is influenced by these transfer policies. To investigate these issues, I develop a dynamic model of altruistic transfers in which transfers...

Recent empirical work on the strength of precautionary saving has yielded widely varying conclusions. The mixed findings may reflect a number of difficulties in proxying uncertainty, executing instrumental variables estimation, and incorporating theoretical restrictions into empirical models....

In this paper household level data are used to explore whether unemployment risk is an important factor in the timing of consumers' durable goods purchase decisions. A theoretical model is presented in which both income uncertainty and household debt play a direct role, offering a potential...

This paper investigates the composition of households' assets and liabilities in the United States. Using aggregate and survey data, we document major trends in household portfolios in the past 15 years. We show that, despite the broad array of financial products available, the portfolio of the...

There are very few sources of high-quality data on the dynamics of wealth accumulation. This paper uses newly-available data from the 1983-89 panel of the Survey of Consumer Finances to examine household saving and portfolio change over the 1980s. The 1983 SCF collected detailed information on...