The main contribution of the paper is an attempt to address the selection and growth issues by working, not with cohorts of households, but with cohorts of individuals. The gain from doing so is that we dispose completely of selection associated with household formation, which compro-mises our...

East Asia and Latin America have diverged in several dimensions in the past there decades. This paper compares households saving behavior in two countries in each region (Mexico, Peru, Thailand and Taiwan).

The main conclusion is that the negligible proprnsity to save for the poor can be explained stasfactorily without invoking the idea that the poor discount future utility at an excessive rate.

In this paper a model is developed which determines the socially optimal level of saving for a small open economy. The model also determines the socially optimal disposition of saving between domestic capital accumulation and overseas asset accumulation.

The questions raised by this paper include the following: Did working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century save more for precautionary purposes, to finance retirement or to provide for unforeseen circumstances such as unemployment, illnesses, or accidents before the...