Insurance companies, like other financial institutions, have been evolving from specialized businesses to enterprises offering a variety of financial services. Rising interest rates impelled this evolution during much of the past three decades as most insurers tried to remain competitive....

Economic policymakers attempt to improve the welfare of their citizens, based on assumptions about how people think, feel, and behave, and on what they view as welfare-improving. Economists usually describe economic agents as fully informed and model them as striving to maximize a set of stable...

Many are worried that since 1980 capital investment by businesses has been lower than expected. Unusual circumstances, such as changes in savings patterns or in business leverage, a credit crunch, or widespread adoption of a shorter-term outlook, have been suggested as culprits. To see whether...

A currency board can allow a developing economy to establish its domestic currency relatively promptly and efficiently by fixing the value of its currency to that of another country and guaranteeing that its currency is backed by sufficient foreign exchange reserves. Currency boards not only...

The preceding article analyzed the determinants of investment at the macroeconomic level. In general, analysis of investment at this degree of aggregation implies that all firms in the economy react similarly to the same macro-level variables. Yet, examining macro data may obscure a great deal...

The introduction by the U.S. Treasury of inflation-indexed notes was one of the most widely publicized innovations in the U.S. capital markets in recent years. Since their introduction in January 1997, $57 billion in 5-, 10-, and 30-year Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) has been...

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...