The observed reluctance of most individuals in the United States to buy individual life annuities, and the concomitant approximately flat average age-wealth profile, stand in sharp contradiction to the standard life cycle model of consumption-saving behavior. The analysis in this paper lends...

This paper documents a long-standing stability in the relationship between outstanding debt and economic activity in the United States, and explores the implications for capital formation of several hypotheses that could explain this observed phenomenon. The aggregate of outstanding credit...

In the absence of major policy changes, federal government budget deficits will probably constitute a serious impediment to any increase inthe U.S. economy's net investment rate, and may even depress the investment rate still further, during the latter 1980s. The U.S. Government's outstanding...