The maturation of the 401(k) system and the enactment of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which made 401(k) plans easier and more automatic, were expected to enhance the role that 401(k)s played in the provision of retirement income. So, originally, the release of the Federal Reserve's 2007...

This paper assesses the effects of insurance and capital requirements on assets' equilibrium returns in a capital-asset-pricing model in which intermediaries possess better information than the public about the yields on a set of assets. Equilibrium returns depend on two risk premiums that...

The enormous growth in both Social Security and private pension plans has stimulated much interest in the impact of these retirement programs on individual saving behavior and the level of national saving. The first issue is the extent to which employees covered by pension plans reduce their own...

The correspondence between the demand for capital and various measures of the return on assets, the cost of capital, and Tobin’s q often is tenuous (Abel and Blanchard 1986; Hayashi 1982), at times even perverse. Of a variety of possible explanations, this paper considers the consequences of...

The correspondence between the demand for capital and various measures of Tobin’s q often is tenuous (Abel and Blanchard 1986; Hayashi 1982), at times even perverse. Among the possible explanations for this apparent challenge to the q theory of investment, this paper considers the consequences of...