This paper examines the extent to which permanent terms-of-trade shocks have an asymmetric effect on private savings. The first part uses a simple three-period model to show that, if households expect to face binding borrowing constraints in bad states of nature, savings rates will respond...

With fixed costs of participating in the stock market, consumers with high income will participate in the stock market, but consumers with lower income will not participate. If a fully-funded defined-contribution social security system tries to exploit the equity premium by selling a dollar of...

This paper investigates whether peer effects play an important role in retirement savings decisions. We use individual data from the staff of a university to study whether individual decisions to enroll in a Tax Deferred Account plan sponsored by the university (and the choice of the mutual fund...

In this paper, we analyze the 401(k) savings behavior of employees in a large U.S. corporation before and after an interesting change in the company 401(k) plan. Before the plan change, employees were required to affirmatively elect participation in the 401(k) plan. After the plan change,...

People earn just enough to get by' is a phrase often used to explain the low personal saving rate in the United States. The implicit presumption is that households simply do not earn enough to pay for current needs' and to save. We show in this paper that at all levels of lifetime earnings there...

In this paper, we analyze a variety of data on saving motives, bequest motives, and bequest division from the Comparative Survey of Savings in Japan and the United States,' a binational survey conducted in 1996 by the Institute for Posts and Telecommunications Policy of the Ministry of Posts and...

Several recent studies suggest that the response of national saving to fiscal policy may be non-linear. In this paper we use two data sets to search for the circumstances in which such non-linear responses may arise: a sample of OECD countries used in previous studies, and sample of developing...

The conventional approach to retirement and life insurance planning, which is used throughout the financial planning industry, differs markedly from the economic approach. The conventional approach asks households to specify how much they want to spend before retirement, after retirement, and in...