The past decade has witnessed a decline in saving throughout the developed world—the United States has the dubious distinction of leading the way. The consequences can be serious. For individuals, their own economic security and that of their families is jeopardized. For society, inadequate...

In this survey, I summarize and evaluate the extant literature concerning taxation and personal saving. I describe the theoretical models that economists have used to depict saving decisions, and I explore the positive and normative implications of these models. The central positive question is...

Proponents of transfer taxation argue that levies on gifts and estates serve the dual purposes of breaking up large concentrations of private wealth, while raising significant revenues. A number of commentators have recently questioned the first of these purported advantages, on the grounds that...

In this paper, we argue that actuarial valuation of annuity benefit streams is theoretically inconsistent with the assumption of pure lifecycle motives. Instead, we show that the simple discounted value of future benefits (ignoring the possibility of death) is often a good approximation to the...

In this paper, we examine several aspects of saving and dissaving after retirement. First, we argue that existing evidence on bequeathable age-wealth profiles is suspect, and provide new evidence based on longitudinal data indicating that significant dissaving may occur,particularly among single...