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...

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...

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...

This paper examines whether the sensitivity of corporate investment to internal funds depends on the firm's access to a main bank, using the sample of Japanese manufacturing firms constructed by Hayashi and Inoue (1991). For either of two classifications of firms by their access to a main bank,...

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...

Recently, my claim that depreciation reported in the Japanese national accounts is underestimated by a substantial margin has been challenged by Dekle and Summers (NBER Working Paper No. 3690), on the ground that the implied depreciation rate (ratio of depreciation to the capital stock) is...

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...

This paper examines the impact of taxes on the incentive to invest for the Japanese manufacturing sector in the postwar period. The idyosyricratic feature of the Japanese corporation tax system as compared to the U.S. is the prevelence of tax-free reserves and the tax deductibility of a part of...

This paper surveys recent empirical work on tests for liquidity constraints.The focus of the survey is on the tests based on the Euler equation. After examining the technical aspects of the recent tests on aggregate time-series data and on micro data, the survey tries to evaluate their economic...

The permanent income hypothesis is tested on a four-quarter panel of about two thousand Japanese households for ten commodity groups. Consumption is a distributed lag function of expenditures, and the utility function is additively separable in time. Durability is defined as the persistence of...