This paper examines aggregate savings in a general equilibrium model where infinitely lived households face volatile (and possibly uncertain) income paths, hold a risk-free asset, and face a liquidity constraint. I first show that the equilibrium capital stock in an economy without uncertainty,...

We study the effects of permanent and temporary income shocks on precautionary saving and investment in a "store-or-sow" model of growth. High volatility of permanent shocks results in high precautionary saving in the safe asset and low investment, or a "volatility trap." Namely, big savers...

This paper shows that uninsured risk and borrowing constraints can make an individual's marginal propensity to consume negatively dependent on his/her permanent income. Therefore, higher income growth can lead to higher saving rates without requiring (or causing) high interest rates – in sharp...

Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation with two types of agents (workers and capitalists) we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to...

We study continuous-time optimal consumption and investment with Epstein-Zin recursive preferences in incomplete markets. We develop a novel approach that rigorously constructs the solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation by a fixed point argument and makes it possible to...

This paper characterizes optimal consumption and investment policies for investors with asset return predictability, stochastic labor income and endogenously-determined retirement. We find that the ratio of total wealth-to-labor income (normalized wealth) is the primary determinant of the...

The more a country saves, the less it invests as a share of saving. We build a “store-or-sow” model of growth with precautionary saving and investment to study the nonlinear relationship between investment and saving. We contend that income volatility is an important variable for explaining...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the cause and effect relationship between economic growth and savings in advanced economies and in emerging and developing countries2. In this work we used the method based on studies in macroeconomics and international finance as well as econometric methods...

China's growth is characterized by massive capital accumulation, made possible by high and increasing domestic savings. In this paper we develop a model with the aim of explaining why savings rates have been high and increasing, and we investigate the general equilibrium effects on capital...