This paper reviews the course of fiscal policy and Social Security policy during the 1990s. The 1990s witnessed two fundamental changes in U.S. fiscal policy: a dramatic improvement in the current and projected budget balance, and a shift to a new political consensus in favor of balancing the...

401(k) plans have been the most rapidly growing type of employer- provided pension plan during the last decade. This paper utilizes employee-level data from the 401(k) plan at a medium-sized U.S. manufacturing firm to analyze the participation and contribution decisions of workers eligible for...

Using disaggregated production data we show that the size of seasonal cycles changes significantly over the course of the business cycle. In particular, during periods of high economy-wide activity, some industries smooth seasonal fluctuations while others exaggerate them. We interpret this...

We evaluate some aspects of the finite sample distribution of an instrumental variables estimator of a first order condition of the Holt et al. (1960) linear quadratic inventory model. We find that for some but not all empirically relevant data generating processes and sample sizes, asymptotic...

Using a dynamic linear equation that has a conditionally homoskedastic moving average disturbance, we compare two parameterizations of a commonly used instrumental variables estimator (Hansen (1982)) to one that is asymptotically optimal in a class of estimators that includes the conventional...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

A number of analysts have claimed recently that the consumer price index overstates the annual increase in the cost of living. This paper develops a framework for studying measurement problems in the consumer price index and systematically analyzes the available evidence concerning the magnitude...