We estimate the long-run discount factor for a group of developed and developing countries through standard methodology incorporating adaptive expectations of inflation. We find that the discount factor of developing countries is relatively nearer to unity as compared to that of the developed...

This paper uses a unique survey questionnaire to assess the impact of the 2002 French tax cut on consumption. I find that the proportion of "spender" consumers as opposed to "Ricardian" consumers is relatively high, with 52.7 per cent of the households declaring that they consume their tax cuts....

Economic Growth is only a result indicator: the result of how a society combines savings with the available manpower. The real indicator of economic health is whether such economic growth is combined with an increase in households' net worth.

A major source of insurance coverage for non-elderly adults in the US is employer-based health insurance market. Every participant of this market gets a tax subsidy since premiums are excluded from taxable income. However, people have different incentives to participate in the employer-based...

We reexamine the empirical relevance of habit formation preferences with micro-data on households' portfolio choices. We first derive the analytical solution to the risky asset share in a theoretical model with both habits and time-varying labor income. Our analytical results indicate that (1)...

Both the United States and the United Kingdom publish data on the balance sheet of Households and Non-profit organisations. Eurostat is studying the issue. The time series provide a unique tool to assess whether collectively the individual households are getting richer or poorer. They allow to...

The main purpose of this paper is to study the economic behavior of migrants under uncertainty . We show , in particular, that the impact of the probability of return remains ambiguous regarding both the savings and labor participation of the migrants , this theoritical finding seems to...

This paper investigates empirically the relationship between savings and investment in Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand by employing the bounds testing procedure. There are not many studies on the Feldstein-Horioka puzzle for the developing countries. Using bounds testing for cointegration,...

This paper seeks to empirically verify if the habit persistence phenomenon holds in the Jamaican economy. The results of the GMM time series estimation show the existence of habit formation by Jamaican consumers. Past consumption habits affect the growth rate of consumption, consequently in...

Industrial development is often accompanied by massive migration from agricultural to industrial areas. This paper compares two steady states, the first and the second, which emerge before and after the termination of such migration, respectively. The paper shows that 1) the employment rate must...