What is the basic economic decision-making unit? Is it the household or the extended family? This question is fundamental to economic analysis and policy design. The answer given by the Life Cycle and Keynesian models is that the economic unit is the household. According to these models, members...

This paper uses PSID data on the extended family to test whether inter vivos transfers from parents to children are motivated by altruism. Specifically, the paper tests whether an increase by one dollar in the income of parents actively making transfers to a child coupled with a one dollar...

We consider four models of consumption that differ with respect to efficient risk-sharing and altruism. They range from complete markets with altruism to family risk-sharing. We use a matched sample of parents and independent children available from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to...

We use the 1988 PSID to study the effects of income and wealth on transfers of money and time between individuals and their parents as well as the effects of incomes of other relatives on these flows. We relate the relative incomes of parents and parents in-law to transfer amounts given and...

We develop a regime-switching SVAR (structural vector autoregression) in which the monetary policy regime, chosen by the central bank responding to economic conditions, is endogenous and observable. There are two regimes, one of which is QE (quantitative easing). The model can incorporate the...

The question we address in this paper is why the Japanese miracle didn't take place until after World War II. For much of the pre-WWII period, Japan's real GNP per worker was not much more than a third of that of the U.S., with falling capital intensity. We argue that its major cause is a...

We study the ex-dividend day behavior of Japanese stock prices for the period 1983-87. We find that, contrary to previous findings, prices of ex-day stocks drop by nearly the full amount of the dividend. However, ex-day stocks shows an abnormal return. Also, for the many ex-dividend day stocks...

This paper examines available evidence on Japan's wealth accumulation. Time-series evidence over the last one hundred years indicates that the phenomenon of extraordinarily high Japanese saving rate ia limited to the high-growth era of 1965-1975. Micro evidence about consumption and aaving by...

We derive from a model of investment with multiple capital goods a one-to-one relation between the growth rate of the capital aggregate and the stock market-based Q. We estimate the growth-Q relation using a panel of Japanese manufacturing firms taking into account the endogeneity of Q....

Altruism has the well-known neutrality implication that the family's demand for commodities is invariant to the division of resources within the family. We test this by estimating Engel curves on a cross-section of Japanese extended families forming two- generation households. We find that the...