This paper investigates empirically why Japan's household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but...

Reliable estimates of actual household saving rates in New Zealand have proved elusive as existing sources of data have in the past given disparate estimates, making it difficult to reach a consensus of the real rate of household saving. For the first time in New Zealand, however, longitudinal...

It is well known that homeowners are richer than renters, even after controlling for observable characteristics. This is often used as an argument for policies that foster homeownership. However, the causal link between homeownership and wealth is difficult to establish due to many potential...

We develop a three-country, stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model to study the effects of changes in both personal and functional income distribution on national current account balances. Each country has a household sector and a non-household (corporate) sector. The household sector is...

Using a model where households can save in either a safe asset or in an illiquid, tax-advantaged pension, we assess the extent to which those who recently reached the state pension age in the UK have saved optimally for retirement. The policy environment specified closely matches that prevailing...

Much of the focus of the UK pensions policy debate over the past decade has been on the adequacy (or otherwise) of private retirement saving. In this paper, we present the first assessment of the optimality of the retirement resources of English couple households born in the 1940s. Here,...

This paper investigates empirically why Japan’s household savings rate fell in the 1990s. We constructed an economic model consisting of two types of household: unconstrained life-cycle households and liquidity-constrained households. Unconstrained households generally save, but...

During the Polish economy transformation process a lot of reforms have been implemented, including those connected with pension system. But future pensioners should not, unfortunately, trust in high rate of future pensions received from pensioner system, much earlier, individually should take...

During the Polish economy transformation process a lot of reforms have been implemented, including those connected with pension system. Th e pension system was based on two obligatory pillars. So-called the second pillar of pension security was supposed to guarantee future humane pension (at an...

The report on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress by Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi concludes that in the measurement of household welfare all material components should be covered, i.e. consumption, income and wealth, from both the micro as well as the macro perspective....