This paper presents a model in which the realizations of stochastic tax and depreciation rates determine both the level and growth rate of output: externalities to investment - learning by watching - are characterized by diminishing returns, yielding a nonlinear "technical progress function"....

The current debate on tax reform has raised again the question of how the corporate tax system should be altered. The cumulative effect of piece meal changes to the tax system has been to produce major distortions in the pattern of savings and investment and falling revenue in real terms. To...

This paper analyses recent contributions to the theory of household saving and examines empirical evidence on the subject. It focuses on (a) the derivation and estimation of first-order conditions for a consumer's optimum lfe-cycle consumption plan, (b) the conditions under which such conditions...

An index of Inequality is constructed which decomposes into two components, corresponding to vertical and "horizontal" equity respectively. Horizontal equity Is defined in terms of changes in the ordering of a distribution. The proposed index is a function to two inequality aversion parameters....

Despite the expansion of empirical research in public finance, there remains consider- able uncertainty about the distributional consequences of fiscal policy. For this session, I have been asked to summarize some international comparisons. I shall divide the issue into two questions. How...

This paper investigates why, in October 1987, almost all stock markets fell together despite widely differing economic circumstances. The idea is that "contagion" between markets occurs as the result of attempts by rational agents to infer information from price changes in other markets. This...

Empirical studies of the life cycle savings model have tended to rej ect the hypothesis of a "hump-shaped" pattern for the wealth-age profile. In this paper we show, using new data on net worth for 12,734 families, that there is evidence that wealth declines after retirement provided that we...

In this paper, we present a simple general equilibrium model of the portfolio behavior of households and institutions, paying particular attention to the influence of differences in tax rates and attitudes toward risk. Under the plausible assumptions that households are more risk averse than...

Empirical tests of the life cycle model have focused on its implications for the level of a household's total net worth and paid little attention to changes in portfolio composition over the life cycle. In this paper, we examine a new survey of the asset holdings of 6,010 U.S households and show...

There has been very little study of the consequences of pension wealth for the composition of household portfolios. Using individual data for 10,118 Canadian households we estimate the portfolio effect of pension wealth. Because most households do not own all of the assets which we are able to...