The last two decades have witnessed the complete or parital privatization of public pension systems in several countries, and many proposals have been made to privatize the U.S. Social Security system either completely or partially. The motivation behind such proposals is that privatization will...

This paper quantifies the role of alternative shocks in accounting for the recent declines in the Japanese saving rate and provides some projections about its future course. We consider three distinct sources of variation in the saving rate: changes in fertility rates, changes in survival rates,...

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the economic effects of public debt in a pure life-cycle economy. The effects on observable quantities are invariably small in cases where the change in the debt is accompanied by a change in lump-sum taxes and transfers. This is true of both the...