This paper examines whether the saving decisions of a large sample of working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century are consistent with consumption smoothing tendencies in the spirit of the permanent income hypothesis. We develop two econometric models to decompose...

This paper examines the saving decisions of a large sample of turn-of-the-century working-class American families. We decompose each family's reported income into permanent and transitory components and then estimate marginal propensities to save from each component. Marginal propensities to...

In this paper we employ microeconomic evidence on the unemployment experiences of American males to evaluate the sensitivity of unemployment to business cycle fluctuations in the late nineteenth century as compared to the mid-twentieth century. Our results indicate a substantial decline in the...

<DIV>Following the approach of R. M. Hartwell, the influential historian of the British Industrial Revolution, these essays explore the cultural contexts and institutional constraints that have shaped growth and development over the past two centuries. <I>Capitalism in Context</I> offers new perspectives on...</i></div>

As the baby boomers begin to retire, a great deal remains unknown about the evolution of wealth toward the end of life. In this paper, we develop a new measure of household resources that converts total financial, nonfinancial, and annuitized assets into an expected annual amount of wealth per...

The downturn in economic activity in the U.S. that began in December 2007 (as determined by researchers with the National Bureau of Economic Research) has been noticeably deeper and has already lasted considerably longer than the prior two recessions--those beginning in July 1990 and in March...

Although the instruments and transactions most closely associated with the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 were novel, the underlying themes that played out in the crisis were familiar from previous episodes: Competitive dynamics resulted in excessive leverage and risk-taking by large,...

This paper investigates whether families save partially to self-insure against uncertain future earnings and estimates the extent to which pooled insurance substitutes for saving as a precaution against earnings risk. An econometric model is estimated using unique household survey data from the...

Combining data from several sources, we build a database of home values, the cost of housing structures, and residential land values for 46 large U.S. metropolitan areas from 1984 to 2004. Our analysis of these new data reveal that since the mid-1980s residential land values have appreciated...