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...

Within optimal investment programs, the accumulation of capital is a stable function of marginal q. Much of the interest in q, however, derives from its potential to reflect the demand for capital when the optimal program changes. If the marginal return on capital diminishes as capital...

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...

This paper examines the characteristics of three funding strategies for pension plans and analyzes the investment strategies that complement these strategies. Although the primary focus is on defined benefit plans, which include Social Security, it also applies to employees’ defined...

The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA) essentially halved the tax rate on dividends and reduced the top tax rate on capital gains. This paper explores the likely effect of JGTRRA on the composition of returns on corporations' common stock. Both larger corporations'...